The beauty of the Whole

Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony?” British philosopher Olaf Stapledon plaintively asks in his “Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future.” How loudly these words echo from the 1930s—a murderous president here, a conman president there, no end in sight for fratricide in the Middle East, and massive species extinction as our planet’s waters rise dangerously.

“Throughout his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres. Once and again he has seemed to himself to catch some phrase or a hint of the whole. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that any such perfect music exists,” Stapledon continues.

So this philosopher uniquely enshrined in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame lived through two world wars with sensitivity intact. Was he shape-shifting?

Born in Egypt in 1886, Stapledon was classically trained in Oxford with a BA and an MA in modern history. These first jobs tellingly immersed him with the common folk—first teaching grammar school in Manchester then working for the Workers Education Association in Liverpool in turn-of-the-century England living through the first throes of industrialization.

Unsurprisingly, the young Olaf was a conscientious objector in WWI, as an ambulance driver in France and Belgium, who won a Croix de Guerre. With a subsequent PhD in philosophy from the University of Liverpool, he was next writing elegant tracts on the ethics and politics of his day. But this original mind would not be confined by tradition.

When he took a dramatic leap to science fiction, he breached more barriers “to reach more people.” “Last and First Men,” the first of his many novels projecting world history on an unprecedented scale, was wildly popular.

Imagining 18 distinct human species in successive varying civilizations from the 1930s on to two billion years, Stapledon describes their ascent to great heights and repeated descent back to savagery. He delves into what became the science of genetic engineering, giving Nietzsche’s Ubermensch a twist in a “supermind” linking many minds in telepathy.

Staying grounded in his time on a double track of philosophy soaring far into the future, he abandoned his pacifism in WWII and backed the war as a left-wing public advocate for the Common Wealth Party and a British internationalist group.

Through it all, he was tracking the course of the human soul. “The strivings of intelligence beaten down by an indifferent universe and its inhabitants who, through no fault of their own, fail to comprehend its lofty yearnings, tormented by the conflict between their  ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ impulses.”

The near-absence of formulaic thought in both his fiction and nonfiction is striking. Equally striking is how this agnostic advocated “spiritual values of intelligence, love and creative action.” With lofty thought approaching TS Eliot’s, his writing transmits compassion way beyond his time, a powerful yearning for greater self-awareness beyond Nietzsche’s “God is dead” polemics.

Stapledon’s subsequent novel, “Star Maker,” an outline history of the universe, struck fellow writers and thinkers in his time. Among those who acknowledged his novels in their own work were Jorge Luis Borges, J.B. Priestley, Virginia Woolf, C.S. Lewis. H.P. Lovecraft, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, the British Astronomical Association president Patrick Moore, and the evolutionary biologist/geneticist John Maynard Smith. Such was Stapledon’s influence that his ideas continue to ripple in the so-called New Age today. Hear him echo in the recent film, “The Matrix”?

Notably, this is how this rara avis completes his thought on the agonizing beauty of the Whole: “Man is himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things…

“And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts and peace, thankful for the past and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this music that is man.”

Such a hopeful visionary certitude is a lifeline indeed in these apocalyptic times.

Sylvia L. Mayuga is an essayist, sometime columnist, poet, documentary filmmaker and environmentalist. She has three National Book Awards to her name.