I want to write something, but there's nothing to write about. Usually it's the other way around, there are a million ideas and reasons, but I'm too lazy to bang on the keys, even lazier to articulate my thoughts, and the laziest of all is to beautifully construct phrases.
Eventually, I remembered a reason. I finished reading "War and Peace". To be completely precise, I've already managed to read Lem's "Fiasco" and half of the book "The Engines of God" by I don't remember who, because I haven't decided yet whether I like it or not.
First, about "War and Peace". Overall, old man Leo goes hard paints sweeping canvases, quite epochal and true-to-life. A couple of times I even felt sorry for the characters. Especially for Prince Andrei, who says wonderful things when Pierre comes to visit him for the first time, and not only that time. I can brag - for my worldview to become like Prince Andrei's, I didn't need to live to almost 30 and get concussed by an artillery shell. It's just a pity that the religious dude Tolstoy ultimately cleverly leads the reader to the point that even such convinced, educated and noble materialists and atheists as Andrei will ultimately Behold the Grace of God (c)
And in general, Tolstoy stubbornly insists that life is a fickle thing, full of coincidences, physiology determines the behavior of individuals, and circumstances determine the behavior of history. Fortunately, judging by his own murky life path, a modern person who has picked up a superficial knowledge of psychology would say that Tolstoy often sublimates his own complexes and over-reflects. It's also unclear why a philosophical essay, loosely connected to the rest of the text, unlike the reflections on history right within the book, is tacked on at the end. Is it to educate the readers? It's like the book itself is for entertainment, but at the end you have to do some mental work?
And of course, I am not at all pleased with the final conclusions about religion, which, you see, is the conscience of humanity, and the only thing capable of giving real meaning to life. So narrow-minded people (not all believers are narrow-minded, please don't twist my words) read this and then try to prove: "But Tolstoy said!"
Fortunately, materialists and skeptics have their own, no less powerful minds. One of such people is the great Polish writer and philosopher Stanislaw Lem.
"Fiasco" - one of his last works in the sci-fi genre (formally), recognized by many as an extremely outstanding piece. However, when I read Lem, I get a feeling similar to when I listen to certain music. It's hard to put it into words. The closest would be pitiful helplessness, a touch of surprise, detached shock, and the question: "How?". How can a human create something like this? What incredible imagination must one possess to create something that 95% of the people on the planet won't even be able to properly understand? What kind of mind, to make it all look quite consistent? What knowledge and erudition, if in every tenth sentence there is a word that you have to look up in the dictionary, and in every hundredth - a word that isn't even in the dictionary?
While Tolstoy and Dostoevsky pull far-fetched problems of morality and ethics out of thin air, Lem tries to apply such problems to the existence and development of civilization. He looks forward, rather than wallowing in questions that are insoluble by definition.
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