Solaris

Ravintzer: The Little Apocrypha.

Long considered a classic, Solaris asks the question: Can we understand the universe around us without first understanding what lies within?

Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.

, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws.

“I don’t know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfils no purpose—a god who simply is.”

Solaris could be the first phase of the despairing God. Perhaps its intelligence will grow enormously. All the contents of our Solarist libraries could be just a record of his teething troubles

That kind of religion has never been .. . necessary. If I understand you, and I’m afraid I do, what you have in mind is an evolving god, who develops in the course of time, grows, and keeps increasing in power while remaining aware of his powerlessness. For your god, the divine condition is a situation without a goal. And understanding that, he despairs. But isn’t this despairing god of yours mankind, Kelvin? It is man you are talking about, and that is a fallacy, not just philosophically but also mystically speaking.”

there are not and cannot be any bridges between Solaris and Earth.

Even when man had explored every corner of the cosmos, and established relations with other civilizations founded by creatures similar to ourselves, Solaris would remain an eternal challenge.

Was the ocean a living creature? It could hardly be doubted any longer by any but lovers of paradox or obstinacy. It was no longer possible to deny the ‘psychic’ functions of the ocean, no matter how that term might be defined. Certainly it was only too obvious that the ocean had ‘noticed’ us. This fact alone invalidated that category of Solarist theories which claimed that the ocean was an ‘introverted’ world, a ‘hermit entity,’ deprived by a process of degeneration of the thinking organs it once possessed, unaware of the existence of external objects and events, the prisoner of a gigantic vortex of mental currents created and confined in the depths of this monster revolving between two suns.

Not only that, we had discovered that the ocean was capable of reproducing what we ourselves had never succeeded in creating artifically—a perfect human body, modified in its sub-atomic structure for purposes we could not guess.

The ocean lived, thought and acted. The ‘Solaris problem’ had not been annihilated by its very absurdity. We were truly dealing with a living creature.