Solaris

by Stanisław Lem

I could feel it now, even when I closed my eyes. I opened them at once, because I wanted to see as much as possible.

“He’s in the lab upstairs. I doubt he’ll come out before nightfall, but… in any case you’ll recognize him. If you should see anyone else, you understand, not me or Sartorius, you understand, then…”

“Stay calm,” he persisted. “Act as if… Be prepared for anything. That’s impossible, I know. But try anyhow. It’s the only way. I don’t know any other.”

Yet while the biologists saw it as a primitive being—something like an immense syncytium, in other words a single, monstrously grown, fluid cell (even though they called it a “prebiological form”) that extended across the entire globe in a jelly-like covering whose depth reached several miles in places—the

the astronomers and physicists, on the other hand, claimed it must be a highly organized structure, perhaps exceeding terrestrial organisms in its complexity, since it was capable of actively influencing the orbit of its plane—for no other cause had been discovered that might explain Solaris’s behavior.

This was highly original, except that it was still the case no one knew how a syrupy jelly could stabilize the orbit of a celestial body.

sea-cum-brain

Was thinking without consciousness possible? Yet could the processes that took place in the ocean be regarded as thought? Is a mountain a very large rock? Is a planet a huge mountain?

The room was empty. In front of me there was only the gaping black of the bay window. The sensation lingered. The darkness was looking at me, amorphous, immense, eyeless, devoid of limits. The gloom outside was unbrightened by even a single star.

She looked exactly like she had the last time I saw her alive. At that time she’d only been nineteen years old; today she would have been twenty-nine, but naturally she hadn’t altered—the dead remain young.

I check the movement of the sun, and make sure she has that dimple of hers where nobody else has one,

I cast around with my eyes for something to tie her up with.

freak

“A normal person,” he said. “What is a normal person? Someone who’s never done anything heinous? Right, but has he never even thought about it?

That face was like a face…

No way

I reveled in the pervasive darkness. I was breathing deeply, liberated from all thoughts.

I was lying on my back, without a thought, her head on my shoulder.

Real

“Why are you staring like that?” “Because you’re beautiful.” She smiled. But it was only out of politeness, a thank-you for the compliment.

recalling some sort of immense gills of an embryo growing a thousand times faster than normal, and streaming with pinkish blood and a green water so dark it’s almost black. From this moment the symmetriad begins to manifest its most extraordinary quality: the modeling or even suspension of laws of physics. Let us begin by saying that no two symmetriads are alike and that the geometry of each is, as it were, an “invention”

Stupid chapter none of this means anything

And what does all this mean? Yes indeed, what does it mean…

Asking myself this

“When you lie for hours through the night like that, in your thoughts you can go very far, and in very strange directions, you know…”

“What could be done?” She was silent. “Do you want to die?” “I think so.”

I’m looking at you right now and trying to explain to you that you’re more precious to me than the twelve years of my life I devoted to Solaris, and that I want to go on being with you. Perhaps your appearance was meant to be torture, perhaps a reward, or perhaps just a test under a microscope. An expression of friendship, a treacherous blow, perhaps a taunt? Perhaps everything at once or—as seems most likely to me—something entirely different.

I’ll only say one thing: in an inhuman situation you’re trying to behave like a human being. That may be admirable, but it’s also futile.

Can a person be responsible for his own subconscious? If I’m not responsible for it, then who could be…?

Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.

I had already chosen; and, pretending that nothing had happened, I didn’t even have the strength to despise myself.

They’re wandering around in a library of books written in an unknown language, and just looking at the colors of the spines… That’s how it is!”

“I need to sleep. Otherwise I really don’t know…”

People of outstanding abilities and strength of character are born at more or less regular intervals, so it’s only the matter of their selection that is uneven.

I can’t explain it any other way, but I had the feeling that everything on the Station, and especially what was between Harey and me, was presently in a frail, precarious equilibrium, and that moving it could bring everything to ruin.

Because we talked a lot about how we were going to live on Earth, how we’d settle somewhere on the outskirts of a big city and never again leave the blue sky and green trees, and together we dreamed up the interior of our future home, and what our yard would look like, we even argued about details… the hedge, the bench… did I believe in it all even for a second? No. I knew it was impossible.

“Yes. I’ve been thinking about various things and—” “I’d rather you didn’t think so much.”

This is… a cripple God, who always desires more than he’s able to have, and doesn’t always realize this to begin with. Who has built clocks, but not the time that they measure. Has built systems or mechanisms that serve particular purposes, but they too have outgrown these purposes and betrayed them. And has created an infinity that, from being the measure of the power he was supposed to have, turned into the measure of his boundless failure.”

A human being, appearances to the contrary, doesn’t create his own purposes. These are imposed by the time he’s born into; he may serve them, he may rebel against them, but the object of his service or rebellion comes from the outside. To experience complete freedom in seeking his purposes he would have to be alone, and that’s impossible, since a person who isn’t brought up among people cannot become a person.