Solaris

by Stanisław Lem

We’re humanitarian and noble, we’ve no intention of subjugating other races, we only want to impart our values to them and in return, to appropriate their heritage. We see ourselves as Knights of the Holy Contact. That’s another falsity. We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled. We desire to find our own idealized image; they’re supposed to be globes, civilizations more perfect than ours; in other worlds we expect to find the image of our own primitive past. Yet on the other side there’s something we refuse to accept, that we fend off; though after all, from Earth we didn’t bring merely a distillation of virtues, the heroic figure of Humankind! We came here as we truly are, and when the other side shows us that truth—the part of it we pass over in silence—we’re unable to come to terms with it!” “Then what is it?” I asked, having heard him out patiently. “It’s what we wanted: contact with another civilization. We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope!”