The Long View

The Long View

There are few people, much less countries, that take the long view save for possibly the Chinese as their civilization is the longest running example of how a particular society conducts business on planet earth yet forever remaining a fleeting moment in a reality we will never fully understand. In writing, there is one writer who embodies The Long View and his name is Olaf Stapledon.

Olaf Stapeldon

Taking a still wider view, we see that this aeon of four thousand million years is itself no more than a moment in comparison with the sun's age. And before the birth of the sun the stuff of this galaxy had already endured for aeons as a nebula. Yet even those aeons look brief in relation to the passage of time before the myriad great nebula themselves, the future galaxies, condensed out of the all-pervading mist in the beginning. Thus the whole duration of humanity, with its many sequent species and its incessant downpour of generations, is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos. ”Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future

Existentialism, combined with a profound understanding of science and philosophy, permeate his writings contemplating the issue of mortality and its deep connect to an existence that doesn't care. Another interesting aspect of Stapeldon's work is his unique ability to convey how a given creature perceives reality, in this case, in the guise of an enhanced dog named, Sirius.

“So sensitive was he to odour and sound, that he found human speech quite inadequate to express the richness of these two universes. He once said of a certain odour in the house, 'It's rather like the trail of a hare where a spaniel has followed it, and some time ago a donkey crossed it too.' Both scent and sound had for him rich emotional meaning, innate and acquired. It was obvious that many odours that he encountered for the first time roused a strong impulse of pursuit, while others he sought to avoid. It was obvious, too, that many odours acquired an added emotional meaning through their associations. One day when he was out on the moor by himself one of his paws was badly cut on a broken bottle. It happened that while he limped home there was a terrifying thunderstorm. When at last he staggered in at the front door, Elizabeth mothered him and cleaned up his foot with a certain well-known disinfectant. The smell of it was repugnant to him, but it now acquired a flavour of security and kindliness which was to last him all his life.”

In the end, it all comes down to this.

“Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded, and all the suns gone dead and cold, there'll still be time. Oh, God, what for?” ― Olaf Stapledon, Sirius