| About the book
Since the envoys had brought news of the arrival of the Emperor, Bolesław’s kingdom had been overwhelmed by an all-encompassing state of commotion. Aside from the settlers living deep within the deepest forests, there was probably no one who did not, in some way or other, (...)
more >> |
| | About the book
8
The phones are always going wrong, so my parents aren’t upset when there’s no dialling tone. They’re at the fortieth birthday party of a female friend from their class at high school. They say they’re going downstairs to the phone booth for a (...)
more >> |
|
|
Stanisław LemRace of Predators. Final Texts
About the book
Lord of the Brain
It’s the silly season, and I’d like to return to an issue that has been bothering me for ages: the prophets of our immortality. The more cautious ones say human life can easily be prolonged by ten, twenty or thirty years, but in a popular science magazine I have also come across the claim – by a scientist! – that death is actually unnecessary. As they have succeeded in prolonging the life of little worms called nematodes, some people say it can be done for us too, because although the nematode may not actually be a human being, it is a close relative…
I find statements of this kind nonsensical. The neurophysiology textbooks tell us the brain is in charge of all our bodily functions, right down to the chemical composition of the fingernails and the rate at which they grow. Anyone who, like me, has got past eighty, is fully aware that at a certain age we start to deteriorate, and as a result the coordination and synchronicity of our movements becomes poor; it starts with spilling some tea on the tablecloth… While we are still relatively young and able, we have no idea how many processes are controlled exclusively by the brain and happen automatically. Meanwhile, though it is possible to replace the heart, kidneys or joints – nowadays they make very good prosthetic hip and knee joints – there is no substitute for the brain, because it guarantees our individuality and contains the baggage of memory that confirms our identity. We could never exchange it for a blank slate, because a new brain would mean a new person.
Something happens in old people’s brains that could be called wear and tear. In my case it manifests itself in forgetting the names of people and things, philosophical systems for example; my head was once stuffed with all that! The general ability to enunciate properly also disappears. And I am not thinking of symptoms resulting from pathological processes, I’m not talking about Alzheimer’s of any kind, God forbid. The ninetieth year of life is a difficult boundary for people to cross – all that is likely to follow is a period of existing like a vegetable, assisted by those around us, but more passive than not; if a person is ninety-something, he’s not going to be very inventive any more. And as for those characters whom the gerontophiles find so thrilling for some incomprehensible reason – like the man in the Caucasus who reached the age of one hundred and eighteen, or the old lady in Japan who got to one hundred and twenty – personally I find them horrifying. I imagine a frail creature living the life of a cabbage – he’s not going to come up with anything new or write anything and has the greatest difficulties doing anything. What sort of satisfaction is there in that?
And there’s no helping it, because we are a mortal species. In any case I have always been amazed that even though we are mortal, we leave written works behind us. I loved the inscription on the Polytechnic building in Lwów: “Hic mortui vivunt”. Whenever I choose something serious to read, I want to know if the author is alive or not. If he isn’t, somehow I have a different attitude to his pronouncements.
Automatic functions and the brain’s ability to synchronise and coordinate are one thing. We also have consciousness. Recent data suggests, as I have long suspected, that our consciousness is very widely dispersed in our brains and it is impossible to identify a central location for it. The idea that says there must be a little something called the “self” at the very centre of our heads is nonsense. Instead it involves various central points, optical, acoustic, kinaesthetic, points of motor control and so on, which combine to form a whole.
Certain processes of the brain can of course be improved, but in the case of functional disorders caused by age, the chances of any improvement are minimal. A strange characteristic of my brain is that in the evening when I am sleepy I start to hear a sort of tune, as if an orchestra were playing, although I know there isn’t one. Sometimes I find it interesting, sometimes disturbing – a musical phrase that keeps on repeating itself. As I fall asleep the tune disappears, and when I wake up it is no longer there. All this is symptomatic of neurological breakdown or wear and tear.
For us humans, an age of eighty to ninety is the upper limit, which is why we take so much delight in reading about the lives of stars where ten or fifteen million years mean nothing at all, or galaxies that go on existing for four hundred million years, or about evolution taking billions of years… I know I’m an infinitely long way off from that, but just knowing that the human mind is able to touch on the mystery of the longevity of the systems of the universe is something I find fascinating, certainly more so than what most people live and breathe. …
Old age means I am reluctant to agree to interviews now, but recently I had a visit from a Japanese woman who was very amiable and spoke good Polish. She translated The High Castle, and had had some problems – what for instance is bigos? – but the Internet had helped. And yesterday a Frenchwoman came who said I am mainly concerned with mysticism and the general theory of contemplation. I tried my best to explain gently that she was wrong, but I could see that my efforts were in vain. In any case I was having problems, because I no longer speak French as well as I did years ago.
I tried asking the guest from Tokyo what a Japanese person can gain from my High Castle. What do they make of it? Just as when you throw a stone into water the rings spread wider and wider, so it is with my books: on the one hand Brazil and Portugal, on the other Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China… It is of no consequence to me any more, because I am very old, but I think that if my father, who died here in Krakow at the age of seventy-four, had known about this, he might have been reassured, because he was extremely worried that I had given up medicine…
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Back |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
|
|
|
|
