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Frasi di Olaf Stapledon
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William Olaf Stapledon è stato uno scrittore e filosofo britannico, che con le sue opere letterarie contribuì grandemente allo sviluppo del genere fantascientifico nel Novecento.

Concetti che oggi sono parte integrante della fantascienza – ingegneria genetica, terraformazione, imperi galattici, menti collettive, sfere di Dyson sono solo alcuni di questi – possono essere fatti risalire in sostanza alle sue due opere Infinito e Il costruttore di stelle, seppure possono esserci stati riferimenti passeggeri ad alcuni di essi nella fantascienza precedente.

Molte delle opere di Stapledon presentano la tensione tra le aspirazioni più nobili degli esseri intelligenti e i loro istinti animaleschi e violenti. In genere la sua narrativa espone gli avvenimenti in modo distaccato ed impersonale, dando una visione d'insieme di grande ampiezza ma dissolvendo il senso dell'individualità. Wikipedia  

✵ 10. Maggio 1886 – 6. Settembre 1950
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Olaf Stapledon: Frasi in inglese

“To say that the cosmos was expanding is equally to say that its members were contracting. The ultimate centers of power, each at first coincident with the punctual cosmos, themselves generated the cosmical space by their disengagement from each other.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 162)

“Myriads of individuals, each one unique, live out their lives in rapt intercourse with one another, contribute their heart’s pulses to the universal music, and presently vanish, giving place to others. All this age-long sequence of private living, which is the actual tissue of humanity’s flesh, I cannot describe. I can only trace, as it were, the disembodied form of its growth.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XIV: Neptune; Section 3, “Slow Conquest” (p. 211)

“We must face the fact that, though the free intelligence and the spirit of community are at once the goal and an essential means, they may be not only ineffectual but actually harmful, unless they are combined with a full measure of that hot indignation against tyranny, that devoted service in the struggle for the new order, which is characteristic of the best minds of the political Left. On the other hand, the political Left, if it is to capture the imagination and allegiance of the people of this country and sweep them forward to victory, must, I believe, learn a more liberal spirit. I mean, of course, liberal not in the political but in the cultural sense, namely, loyalty to the free critical intelligence and respect for the human individual.”

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Olaf Stapledon

Origine: Philosophy and Living (1939), Chapter XIII: The Practical Upshot

“These three activities, then, intelligence, love and creative action, which are so closely involved in one another, I cannot but feel to be intrinsically good. In their outstanding expressions they are good in an outstanding degree. Together they form the distinctively human kind of behaviour.”

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Olaf Stapledon

Other texts

“I can only point out that, the higher a mind’s development, the more it discovers in the universe to occupy it.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XI: Man Remakes Himself; Section 4, “The Culture of the Fifth Men” (p. 173)

“The ideologies of the super-tribes exercised absolute power over all individual minds under their sway.
In civilized regions the super-tribes and the overgrown natural tribes created an astounding mental tyranny. In relation to his natural tribe, at least if it was small and genuinely civilized, the individual might still behave with intelligence and imagination. Along with his actual tribal kinsmen he might support a degree of true community unknown on Earth. He might in fact be a critical, self-respecting and other-respecting person. But in all matters connected with the super-tribes, whether national or economic, he behaved in a very different manner. All ideas coming to him with the sanction of nation or class would be accepted uncritically and with fervor by himself and all his fellows. As soon as he encountered one of the symbols or slogans of his super-tribe he ceased to be a human personality and became a sort of de-cerebrate animal, capable only of stereotyped reactions. In extreme cases his mind was absolutely closed to influences opposed to the suggestion of the super-tribe. Criticism was either met with blind rage or actually not heard at all. Persons who in the intimate community of their small native tribe were capable of great mutual insight and sympathy might suddenly, in response to tribal symbols, be transformed into vessels of crazy intolerance and hate directed against national or class enemies. In this mood they would go to any extreme of self-sacrifice for the supposed glory of the super-tribe. Also they would show great ingenuity in contriving means to exercise their lustful vindictiveness upon enemies who in favorable circumstances could be quite as kindly and intelligent as themselves.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter V: Worlds Innumerable; 2. Strange Mankinds (p. 62)

“Dear beautiful one, I praise the stars for the song's end. Farewell!”

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Olaf Stapledon

Other texts
Origine: Far Future Calling http://web.archive.org/web/20090721194935/http://olafstapledonarchive.webs.com/farfuturecalling.html

“[S]o far as music ever had a "meaning" beyond the immediate and exquisite value of the sound-pattern itself, its "meaning" must be simply an emotional attitude. It could never speak directly about the objective world, or "the nature of existence"; but it might create a complex emotional attitude which might be appropriate to some feature of the objective world, or to the universe as a whole.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Sirius

Origine: Sirius (1944), Chapter IX Sirius and Religion.

“In man, social intercourse has centred mainly on the process of absorbing fluid into the organism, but in the domestic dog and to a lesser extent among all wild canine species, the act charged with most social significance is the excretion of fluid.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Sirius

Origine: Sirius (1944), Chapter VIII Sirius at Cambridge (a passage supposedly written by Sirius)

“Nothing but man was really cruel, vindictive, except perhaps the loathly cat.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Sirius

Origine: Sirius (1944), Chapter VIII Sirius at Cambridge.

“In time, of course, Paul's day world ceased to be flat, and became a huge ball. At this stage the universe was more like a dumpling than a sandwich. Vaguely Paul still conceived the three levels of existence. The nether night was deep down within the ball of the day world. The starry night was all around it. On the ball were all the countries except Fairyland, which was nowhere.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last Men in London

Origine: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter III: The Child Paul

“Radio, which formerly had been the main force making for cosmopolitanism, became suddenly in each country the main stimulus to nationalism. Morning, noon and night, every civilized people was assured that enemies, whose flavor was of course subhuman and foul, were plotting its destruction. Armament scares, spy stories, accounts of the barbarous and sadistic behavior of neighboring peoples, created in every country such uncritical suspicion and hate that war became inevitable…All thought of human brotherhood, and even of personal safety, was swept away by a savage blood-lust.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter III: The Other Earth; 2. A Busy World (p. 36)

“On my native planet, whenever I had been dismayed by the suffering and the futility of individuals, I had taken comfort in the thought that at least the massed effect of all our blind striving must be the slow but glorious awakening of the human spirit. This hope, this certainty, had been the one sure consolation. But now I saw that there was no guarantee of any such triumph. It seemed that the universe, or the maker of the universe, must be indifferent to the fate of worlds. That there should be endless struggle and suffering and waste must of course be accepted; and gladly, for these were the very soil in which the spirit grew. But that all struggle should be finally, absolutely vain, that a whole world of sensitive spirits fail and die, must be sheer evil. In my horror it seemed to me that Hate must be the Star Maker.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter III: The Other Earth; 3. The Prospects of the Race (pp. 44-45)

“It is better to be destroyed than to triumph in slaying the spirit. Such as it is, the spirit that we have achieved is fair; and it is indestructibly woven into the tissue of the cosmos. We die praising the universe in which at least such an achievement as ours can be.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter IX: The Community of Worlds; 3. A Crisis in Galactic History (p. 117)

“[T]he thought is somewhat repugnant to us that we should slowly sink into barbarism, into the sub-human, into blind and whimpering agony, that the last of Man should be a whine. This may well happen, but even by such a prospect we are not seriously dismayed. If it does occur, it will doubtless seem intolerable to our degraded spirits. But today, we are fully possessed of ourselves. (…) [T]o the spirit that has drunk deeply of the grave beauty of the cosmos, even the ultimate horror is acceptable.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last Men in London

Last Men in London (1932)

“In this world, as in our own, nearly all the chief means of production, nearly all the land, mines, factories, railways, ships, were controlled for private profit by a small minority of the population. These privileged individuals were able to force the masses to work for them on pain of starvation. The tragic farce inherent in such a system was already approaching. The owners directed the energy of the workers increasingly toward the production of more means of production rather than to the fulfilment of the needs of individual life. For machinery might bring profit to the owners; bread would not. With the increasing competition of machine with machine, profits declined, and therefore wages, and therefore effective demand for goods. Marketless products were destroyed, though bellies were unfed and backs unclad. Unemployment, disorder, and stern repression increased as the economic system disintegrated. A familiar story!”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter III: The Other Earth; 2. A Busy World (pp. 30-31)

“At first it had been youth's ideal of what youth should be, a pattern woven of fanatical loyalty, irresponsible gaiety, comradeship, physical gusto, and not a little pure devilry.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter V: The Fall of the First Men; Section 3, “The Cult of Youth” (p. 84)

“Without Satan, with God only, how poor a universe, how trite a music!”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last Men in London

Origine: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter VII: After the War.

“Nations appeared, and all the phobias that make up nationalism.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter IX: Earth and Mars; Section 2, “The Ruin of Two Worlds” (p. 137)

“Only in couples and in little circles of companions could they support true community, the communion of mutual insight and respect and love. But in their tribes and nations they conceived all too easily the sham community of the pack, baying in unison of fear and hate.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter V: Worlds Innumerable; 1. The Diversity of Worlds (p. 56)

“Sunsets in pictures are so tiresome, but only boors and half-wits are not stirred by real sunsets.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Sirius

Sirius (1944)

“Behold the sons of men.
who sin.
whose hearts are divine!
In selfishness they heap misery on one another;
yet for love they die. (…)
Scatter gold among them, and they are beasts;

show them God, and they are sons of God”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last Men in London

Last Men in London (1932)

“I paced up and down the little room, a queer thing happened. It was as though my wandering imagination came upon a new quality, different from all that I had ever known; yet one which was also more familiar and intimate than the smell of Plaxy in the mood of love, more piercing sweet than bitches, more hunt-worthy than the trail of a fox.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Sirius

Sirius (1944)

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