This gentleman began to persuade me to follow him! I have to exchange my life for a Robinsonade, which represents not just a primitive existence, but, you see, an intense struggle of eternal human wisdom and cunning with the elements. This latter-day Diogenes and his philosophy tried to propagate me! It only took a few theses to, as it seemed to me, destroy his beliefs in half, like a worm, these two halves in half and so on, but it was all in vain. Each part lived its own life, wriggled, asserted its primitivism, mocked civilization.
“You no longer represent the human race, but a tribe of disgusting know-it-alls.” You have created some kind of monstrous automatic paradise on your planet. You distanced yourself from nature, subjugated it, forced it to work until self-destruction, you broke it, raped it with your discoveries. When this was not enough for you, you invented a new nature in your laboratories, artificial, chemical and machine, contrary to the goals and will of nature itself. It must be surrounded by mystery, for the distant future centuries are threatened by an omnipotent man, whose brain and hands will create even more terrible things, because these hands will no longer belong to man.
I answered Mr. Thinker that he himself had lost his human form and his words made no sense. The future person will develop harmoniously. And besides, he forgot about other worlds, about new planets that we discover during space flights and to which our spaceships descend. It would be very sad if only one sun always shone above the head of humanity and another star never rose. If people were always doomed to tinker only with their Earth, remake, improve – only it! But, fortunately, the human spirit, his hands and thoughts have found new, unexplored areas of application on distant planets. You will know happiness when you meet it, but you need to know grief in advance, before it enters your life, this is the only way to defend yourself from it.
I wanted to clarify this thought, but the gentleman, as if not hearing me, continued to mutter his own:
“Today you all don’t even remember what these feelings are – heaviness, fatigue, pain, you don’t know how pleasant physical work is. The greatest pleasures are not available to you – to taste black bread after a long hunger strike, to taste a sip of water after a long journey, to fall asleep exhausted from hard work. You are sissies who equate yourselves to gods! We have not yet been born, but everything is already prepared for you. Schools are being built faster than new students can grow up, you have hospitals, but there are few patients in them. Your gyms, playgrounds, stadiums are so big that they will never be filled, you have so many art galleries, so many concert halls, so many theaters that you are tired, fed up, brain poisoning has begun. And no one ever knows where to stop.