Solaris

by Stanisław Lem

Solaris was widely regarded as a planet endowed with life—but with only a single inhabitant…

or that the ocean was in fact a neoplasmic glioma which, having come into existence within the bodies of former inhabitants of the planet, had consumed them all and swallowed them up, fusing the remains together in the form of an everlasting, self-rejuvenating, supracellular element.

I’d not even been a whole hour at the Station and I was already starting to understand why incidents of paranoia had occurred here.

There was a time we tormented one another with excessive honesty in the naive belief it would save us.

A gathering roar rises from the unseen depths; air, expelled as if in death throes and rubbing against the narrowing channels, wheezing and thundering in the passageways, stimulates the collapsing ceilings to a wail as if from lifeless vocal cords or monstrous throats overgrown with stalactites of slime, and despite the furious movement that has been unleashed—it is, after all, the movement of destruction—the spectator is immediately overcome by a sense of utter deadness.

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.

What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea, as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.