Norman Spinrad - The Void Captain's Tale (1982)

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At that moment, I do now truly believe, the deed was done, in the sense that the decision of the will is the true essence of the act.

Norman Spinrad
Here, in the company of the mindless trees, the free-flying birds, the bugs and frogs that passed from stimulus directly to response without the interval of consciousness between, did I hope to lose myself in the living mandala of evolution's less self-tortured forms.

Norman Spinrad
In fifteen billion years did spirit out of less than dust evolve, he said. In fifteen billion more will not this universe of stars to less than dust return? Whence did it come? What is there when it is gone?

Norman Spinrad
Genius such as yours is a genetic gift.
So I have heard from my parents.

Norman Spinrad
Was not the arbitrary distinction between illusion and reality the ultimate illusion itself?

Norman Spinrad
The appreciation of the connoisseur is the highest pleasure of the artiste.

Norman Spinrad
Any attempt at willful ignorance would now be futile or worse; the only talisman against excessive knowledge that might have puissance would be more knowledge.

Norman Spinrad
I want to take you as close as you can get, I want to feel your ecstasy as you feel mine, I want to bridge the final gap between us, I want us to come together in a place where each can know the other does not lie.

Norman Spinrad
What moral obligation do you have to those who willfully refuse to open their eyes and deem you mad for seeing?

Norman Spinrad
If the path exists for spirit to transcend this sorry scheme of things entire, vraiment, it must exist for all.
Or for none at all, I thought, but deigned not to voice.

Norman Spinrad
Beneath all this gaiety and baroque complexity lay the simple and so carefully denied: beyond the thin metal surrounding us was the endless humorless void. Hollow rings the laughter of orphans in the night.

Norman Spinrad
True civilization consists precisely of conventions, rituals, and modes of oblique communication whereby the chaos within and the void without may be expressed and contained within the harmonious consensus of shared social objectivity, thus maintaining our bubble of crafted reality, the necessary illusion.

Norman Spinrad
Social morality requires a shared matrix of communal reality to which to relate thought and deed, and the illusion of an objective ethical esthetic requires at the very least the conviction that objective reality is more than a contradiction in terms.

Norman Spinrad
Even now, I cannot decide whether I was foolish dupe or noble and tragic lover. Or whether the two are one and the same.

Norman Spinrad
I could not deny that my spirit was amorally attracted to this ultimate temptation as my conscience was morally repelled by it.

Norman Spinrad
For truth be told, I was tormented by perceptions and their corollary temptation which from a social definition rendered me unsane, though from a more absolute viewpoint what I might be said to have been suffering from was an excess of insight.

Norman Spinrad
Does something truly speak to me from beyond the void, or is it merely my own desire?

Norman Spinrad