Stanislaw Lem - One Human Minute

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One Human Minute

by Stanislaw Lem

Translated by Catherine S. Leach

a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF

Back Cover:

In three scathingly humorous reviews of not-yet-written books, Stanislaw Lem brings us

insights into the life of the 21st century. "One Human Minute" summarizes the activities of every

person on earth during a single minute. "The Upside-Down Evolution" depicts a battlefield

devoid of human activity, where synthetic bugs -- synsects -- vie for supremacy. "The World as

Cataclysm" unfolds the universe as a crooked roulette wheel, where cosmic catastrophe prevails

over orderly evolution. All reflect the speculative imagination and dark humor that have made

Lem a grand master of the science fiction genre.

"It is exhilarating to watch Lem building his argument. . . a splendid performance by a powerful

mind." -- Robert Silverberg, San Francisco Chronicle

by Harcourt Brace & Company

may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or

by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

photocopy, recording, or any information storage

and retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies

of any part of the work should be mailed to:

Permissions Department, Harcourt Brace & Company,

6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lem, Stanislaw.

One human minute.

Translated from the Polish.

"A Helen and Kurt Wolff book."

Contents: One human minute -- The upside down

evolution -- The world as cataclysm. I. Title

PG7158.L39A25 1985 891.8'537 85-14080

ISBN 0-15-169550-4

ISBN 0-15-668795-X (Harvest: pbk.)

Printed in the United States of America

First Harvest edition 1986

B C D E F G H I J

Contents

One Human Minute

The Upside-down Evolution

The World as Cataclysm

One Human Minute

J. JOHNSON AND S. JOHNSON

MOON PUBLISHERS

London -- Mare Imbrium -- New York, 1988

This book presents what all the people in the world are doing, at the same time, in the

course of one minute. So says the Introduction. That no one thought of it sooner is surprising. It

was simply begging to be written after The First Three Minutes, The Cosmologist's Second, and

the Guinness Book of World Records, especially since they were best sellers (nothing excites

publishers and authors today more than a book no one has to read but everyone needs to have).

After those books, the idea was ready and waiting, lying in the street, needing only to be picked

up. It would be interesting to know if "J. Johnson and S. Johnson" are man and wife, brothers, or

just a pseudonym. I would like to see a photograph of these Johnsons. It is hard to explain why,

but sometimes an author's appearance provides a key to a book. For me, at least, that has

happened more than once. If a text is unconventional, reading it requires that one take a special

approach. An author's face can then shed much light. My guess, though, is that the Johnsons do

not exist, and that the "S." in front of the second Johnson is an allusion to Samuel Johnson. But,

then again, perhaps that is not important.

Publishers, as everyone knows, fear nothing so much as the publication of a book, since,

according to Lem's Law, "No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he

understands, he immediately forgets" -- owing to general lack of time, the oversupply of books,

and the perfection of advertising. The ad as the New Utopia is currently a cult phenomenon. We

watch the dreadful or boring things on television, because (as public-opinion research has shown)

after the sight of prattling politicians, bloody corpses strewn about various parts of the globe for

various reasons, and dramatizations in which one cannot tell what is going on because they are

never-ending serials (not only do we forget what we read, we also forget what we see), the

commercials are a blessed relief. Only in them does paradise still exist. There are beautiful

women, handsome men -- all mature -- and happy children, and the elderly have intelligence in

their eyes and generally wear glasses. To be kept in constant delight they need only pudding in a

new container, lemonade made from real water, a foot antiperspirant, violet-scented toilet paper,

or a kitchen cabinet about which nothing is extraordinary but the price. The joy in the eyes of the

stylish beauty as she beholds a roll of toilet paper or opens a cupboard like a treasure chest is

transmitted instantly to everyone. In that empathy there also may be envy and even a little

irritation, because everyone knows he could never experience ecstasy by drinking that lemonade

or using that toilet paper. Everyone knows that this Arcadia is inaccessible, but its glow is

effective nevertheless.

Anyway, it was clear to me from the start that advertising, as it improves in the

merchandising struggle for existence, will enslave us not through the better quality of the goods it

promotes but as a result of the ever-worsening quality of the world. After the death of God, of

high ideals, of honor, of altruism, what is left to us in our overcrowded cities, under acid rains,

but the ecstasy of these men and women of the ads as they announce crackers, puddings, and

spreads like the coming of the Heavenly Kingdom? Because advertising, with monstrous

effectiveness, attributes perfection to everything -- and so to books, to every book -- a person is

beguiled by twenty thousand Miss Universes at once and, unable to decide, lingers unfulfilled in

amorous readiness like a sheep in a stupor. So it is with everything. Cable television,

broadcasting forty programs at once, produces in the viewer the feeling that, since there are so

many, others must be better than the one he has on, so he jumps from program to program like a

flea on a hot stove, proof that technological progress produces new heights of frustration.

Although no one said it in so many words, we were promised the world, everything -- if not to

possess, at least to look at and touch. And literature (is it not but an echo of the world, its likeness

and its commentary?) fell into the same trap. Why should I read about what particular individuals

of different or the same sex say before going to bed, if there is no mention of the thousands of

other, perhaps much more interesting people who do more imaginative things? There had to be a

book, then, about what Everybody Else was doing, so that we would be tormented no longer by

the doubt that we were reading nonsense while the Important Things were taking place

Elsewhere.

The Guinness Book was a best seller because it presented nothing but exceptional things,

with a guarantee of authenticity. This panopticon of records had, however, a serious drawback: it

was soon obsolete. No sooner had some fellow eaten forty pounds of peaches complete with pits

than another not only ate more, but died immediately after from a volvulus, which gave the new

record a dismal piquancy. While it is untrue that there is no such thing as mental illness, that it

was invented by psychiatrists to torment their patients and squeeze money out of them, it is true

that normal people do far madder things than the insane. The difference is that the madman does

what he does disinterestedly, whereas the normal person does it for fame, because fame can be

converted into cash. Of course, some are satisfied with fame alone, so the matter is unclear. In

any case, the still-surviving subspecies of intellectuals scorned this whole collection of records,

and in polite society it was no distinction to remember how many miles someone on all fours

could push a nutmeg with his nose painted lavender.

So a book had to be conceived that resembled the Guinness volume, was serious enough

not to be dismissed with a shrug (like The First Three Minutes), but at the same time was not

abstract, not loaded with theories about bosons and quarks. The writing of such a book -- an

honest, uncontrived book about everything at once, a book that would overshadow all others --

seemed a total impossibility. Even I could not imagine the sort of book it would be. To the

publishers I simply suggested writing a book that at worst would be the perfect antithesis of its

advertising claims; but the idea did not take. Although the work I had in mind might have

attracted readers, since the most important thing today is setting records, and the world's worst

novel would have been a record, it was quite possible that even if I had succeeded, no one would

have noticed.

How sorry I am not to have hit upon the better idea that gave birth to One Human Minute.

Apparently, the publisher does not even have a branch on the Moon; "Moon Publishers," I am

told, is only an advertising ploy. To avoid being called dishonest, the editor sent to the Moon, in a

container on one of the Columbia shuttle flights, a copy of the manuscript and a small computer

reader. If anyone challenged him, he could prove that part of the publishing operation actually did

take place on the Moon, because the computer on the Mare Imbrium read the manuscript over

and over. Perhaps it read without thinking, but that didn't matter: people in publishing houses on

Earth generally read manuscripts the same way.

I should not have struck a satirical note at the beginning of my review, because there is

nothing funny about this book. You may feel indignation; you may take it as an affront to the

entire human race, aimed so skillfully that it is irrefutable, containing nothing but verified facts;

you may console yourself that at least no one can possibly make a film or a television series out

of it -- but it will definitely be worthwhile to think about it, though your conclusions will not be

pleasant.

The book is unmistakably authentic and fantastic -- if, like me, you take "fantastic" to

mean that which goes beyond the limit of our conceptions. Not everyone will agree with me, but I

remain convinced that the poverty of today's fantasy and science fiction lies in the fact that there

is too little of the fantastic in it, in contrast to the reality that surrounds us. Thus, for example, it

turns out that a person with his brain cut in two (there have been many such operations,

especially on epileptics) both is and is not one individual. It happens that such a person, who

appears completely normal, cannot put on trousers, because his right hand pulls them up while his

left lowers them; or that he will embrace his wife with one arm while pushing her away with the

other. It has been shown that in certain cases the right hemisphere of the brain does not know

what the left sees and thinks; so it had to be acknowledged that the splitting of consciousness and

even of personality had been achieved, that, in other words, two people existed in one body. But

other experiments showed no such thing -- not even that sometimes the individual would be

single and sometimes double. The hypothesis that there were one and a half individuals, or two

and something, also fell apart. This is no joke; the question of how many minds reside in such a

person appears to have no answer, and this, indeed, is both real and fantastic. In this and only in

this sense is One Human Minute fantastic.

Although each of us knows that on Earth all the seasons of the year, all climates, and all

hours of the day and night exist together at every moment, we generally do not think about it.

This commonplace, which every elementary-school student knows, or should know, somehow

lies outside our awareness -- perhaps because we do not know what to do with such an

awareness. Every night, electrons, forced to lick the screens of our television sets with frenzied

speed, show us the world chopped up and crammed into the Latest News, so we can learn what

happened in China, in Scotland, in Italy, at the bottom of the sea, on Antarctica, and we believe

that in fifteen minutes we have seen what has been going on in the whole world. Of course, we

have not. The news cameras pierce the terrestrial globe in a few places: there, where an Important

Politician descends the steps of his plane and with false sincerity shakes the hands of other

Important Politicians; there, where a train has derailed -- but not just any derailment will do, only

one with cars twisted into spaghetti and people extracted piece by piece, because there are

already too many minor catastrophes. In a word, the mass media skip everything that is not

quintuplets, a coup d'état (best if accompanied by a respectable massacre), a papal visit, or a royal

pregnancy. The gigantic, five-billion-human backdrop of these events exists for certain, and

anybody who was asked would say, yes, of course he knows that millions of others exist; if he

thinks about it, he might even arrive at the fact that with every breath he takes, so many children

are born and so many people die. It is, nevertheless, a vague knowledge, no less abstract than the

knowledge that, as I write this, an American probe stands immobile in the pale sun on Mars, and

that on the Moon lie the wrecks of a couple of vehicles. The knowledge counts for nothing if it

can be touched with a word but not experienced. One can experience only a microscopic droplet

out of the sea of human destinies that surrounds us. In this respect a human being is not unlike an

amoeba swimming in a drop of water, whose boundaries seem to be the boundaries of the world.

The main difference, I would say, is not our intellectual superiority to the protozoon but the

latter's immortality: instead of dying it divides, thereby becoming its own, increasingly numerous

family.

So the task the authors of One Human Minute set themselves did not look plausible. In

effect, were I to tell someone who has not yet seen the book that it contains few words, that it is

filled with tables of statistics and columns of numbers, he would look upon the undertaking as a

flop, even as insanity. Because what can be done with hundreds of pages of statistics? What

images, emotions, and experiences can thousands of numbers evoke in our heads? If the book did

not exist, if it were not lying on my desk, I would say the concept was original, even striking, but

unrealizable, like the idea that reading the Paris and New York telephone books would tell you

something about the inhabitants of those cities. If One Human Minute were not here in front of

me, I would believe it to be as unreadable as a list of telephone numbers or an almanac.

Consequently, the idea -- to show sixty seconds in the lives of all the human beings who

coexist with me -- had to be worked out as if it were a plan for a major campaign. The original

concept, though important, was not enough to ensure success. The best strategist is not the one

who knows he must take the enemy by surprise, but the one who knows how to do it.

What transpires on Earth even during a single second, there is no way of knowing. In the

face of such phenomena, the microscopic capacity of human consciousness is revealed -- our

consciousness, that boundless spirit which we claim sets us apart from the animals, those

intellectual paupers capable of perceiving only their immediate surroundings. How my dog frets

each time he sees me packing my suitcase, and how sorry I am that I cannot explain to him that

there is no need for his dejection, for the whimpers that accompany me to the front gate. There is

no way to tell him that I'll be back tomorrow; with each parting he suffers the same martyrdom.

But with us, it would seem, matters are quite different. We know what is, what can be; what we

do not know, we can find out.

That is the consensus. Meanwhile, the modern world shows us at every step that

consciousness is a very short blanket: it will cover a tiny bit but no more, and the problems we

keep having with the world are more painful than a dog's. Not possessing the gift of reflection, a

dog does not know that he does not know, and does not understand that he understands nothing;

we, on the other hand, are aware of both. If we behave otherwise, it is from stupidity, or else from

self-deception, to preserve our peace of mind. You can have sympathy for one person, possibly

for four, but eight hundred thousand is impossible. The numbers that we employ in such

circumstances are cunning artificial limbs. They are like the cane a blind man uses; tapping the

sidewalk keeps him from bumping into a wall, but no one will claim that with this cane he sees

the whole richness of the world, or even the small fragment of it on his own street. So what are

we to do with this poor, narrow consciousness of ours, to make it encompass what it cannot?

What had to be done to present the one pan-human minute?

You will not learn everything at once, dear reader, but, glancing first at the table of

contents and then at the respective headings, you will learn things that will take your breath

away. A landscape composed not of mountains, rivers, and fields but of billions of human bodies

will flash before you, as on a dark, stormy night a normal landscape is revealed when a flash of

lightning rends the murk and you glimpse, for a fraction of a second, a vastness stretching toward

all horizons. Though darkness sets in again, that image has now entered your memory, and you

will not get rid of it. One can understand the visual part of this comparison, for who has not

experienced a storm at night? But how can the world revealed by lightning be equated to a

thousand statistical tables?

The device that the authors used is simple: the method of successive approximations. To

demonstrate, let us take first, out of the two hundred chapters, the one devoted to death -- or,

rather, to dying.

Since humanity numbers nearly five billion, it stands to reason that thousands die every

minute. No revelation, that. Nevertheless, our narrow comprehension bumps into the figures here

as if into a wall. This is easy to see, because the words "simultaneously nineteen thousand people

die" carry not one iota more emotional weight than the knowledge that nine hundred thousand are

dying. Be it a million, be it ten million, the reaction will always be the same: a slightly frightened

and vaguely alarmed "Oh." We now find ourselves in a wilderness of abstract expressions; they

mean something, but that meaning cannot be perceived, felt, experienced in the same way as the

news of an uncle's heart attack. Learning of the Uncle's heart attack produces a greater impression

on us.

But this chapter ushers you into dying for forty-eight pages. First come the data

summaries, then the breakdown into specifics. In this way, you look first at the whole subject of

death as through the weak lens of a microscope, then you examine sections in ever-increasing

closeness as if using stronger and stronger lenses. First come natural deaths, in one category, then

those caused by other people, in a separate category, then accidental deaths, acts of God, and so

on. You learn how many people die per minute from police torture, and how many at the hands of

those without government authorization; what the normal curve of tortures is over sixty seconds

and their geographic distribution; what instruments are used in this unit of time, again with a

breakdown into parts of the world and then by nation. You learn that when you take your dog for

a walk, or while you are looking for your slippers, talking to your wife, falling asleep, or reading

the paper, a thousand other people are howling and twisting in agony every consecutive minute of

every twenty-four hours, day and night, every week, month, and year. You will not hear their

cries but you will now know that it is continual, because the statistics prove it. You learn how

many people die per minute by error, drinking poison instead of a harmless beverage. Again, the

statistics take into account every type of poisoning: weedkillers, acids, bases -- and also how

many deaths are the result of mistakes by drivers, doctors, mothers, nurses, and so on. How many

newborns -- a separate heading -- are killed by their mothers just after birth, either on purpose or

through carelessness: some infants are suffocated by a pillow; others fall into a privy hole, as

when a mother, feeling pressure, thought it was a bowel movement, either through inexperience

or mental retardation or because she was under the influence of drugs when the labor began; and

each of these variants has further breakdowns. On the next page are newborns who die through

no one's fault because they are monsters incapable of surviving, or because they are strangled by

the umbilical cord, or because they fall victim to placenta previa or some other abnormality;

again, I am not mentioning everything. Suicides take up a lot of space. Today there are far more

ways of depriving oneself of life than in the past, and hanging has fallen to sixth place in the

statistics. Moreover, the frequency-distribution table for new methods of suicide indicates that

there has been an increase in methods since best-selling manuals have come out with instructions

on making death swift and certain -- unless someone wants to go slowly, which also happens.

You can even learn, patient reader, what the correlation is between the size of the editions of

these how-to suicide books and the normal curve of successful suicides. In the old days, when

people were amateurs at it, more suicide attempts could be foiled.

Next, obviously, come deaths from cancer, from heart attacks, from the science of

medicine, from the four hundred most important diseases; then come accidents, such as

automobile collisions, death from falling trees, walls, bricks, from being run over by a train, from

meteors even. Whether it is comforting to know that casualties from falling meteors are rare, I am

not sure. As far as I can remember, 0.0000001 person per minute dies that way. Obviously, the

Johnsons did solid work. In order to present the scope of death more accurately, they applied the

so-called cross-reference, or diagonal method. Some tables will tell you from what group of

causes people die; others, in what ways they die from a single cause -- for example, electric

shock. This method brings into relief the extraordinary wealth of our deaths. Death occurs most

frequently from contact with an improperly grounded appliance, less often in the tub, and least

often while urinating off a pedestrian bridge onto high-tension wires, this being only a fractional

number per minute. In a footnote the conscientious Johnsons inform us that it is impossible to

separate those who are killed deliberately by electric shock while under torture from those killed

inadvertently when a little too much current is used.

There are also statistics on the means by which the living dispose of the dead, from

funerals with cosmetic corpses, choirs, flowers, and religious pomp, to simpler and cheaper

methods. We have many headings here, because, as it turns out, in the highly civilized countries

more corpses are stuffed into bags with a stone -- or cemented by their feet into old buckets, or

cut up naked into pieces -- and thrown into clay pits and lakes than in the Third World countries;

more, too (another heading), are wrapped up in old newspapers or bloody rags and left in garbage

dumps. The less well off are unacquainted with some of the ways of disposing of remains.

Obviously, the information has yet to reach them, along with financial aid from the developed

nations.

On the other hand, in poor countries more newborns are eaten by rats. These data appear

on another page, but the reader will find a footnote directing him to the place, lest he miss them.

And if he wants to take the book in small doses, he will find everything in the alphabetical index.

One cannot maintain for long that these are dry, boring figures that say nothing. One

begins to wonder morbidly how many other ways people are dying every minute one reads, and

the fingers turning the pages become moist. It is sweat, of course; it can hardly be blood.

Death by starvation (there had to be a separate table for it, with a breakdown by age; most

who starve to death are children) carries a footnote telling us that it is only valid for the year of

publication, since the numbers increase rapidly and in arithmetical progression. Death from

overeating happens, too, of course, but is 119,000 times rarer. These data contain an element of

exhibitionism and an element of blackmail.

I intended only to glance at this chapter, but then read as if compelled, like someone who

peels the bandage off his bleeding wound to look, or who probes the cavity in his aching tooth

with a toothpick: it hurts, but it is hard to stop. The figures are like a tasteless, odorless drug that

seeps into the brain. And yet I have not mentioned -- and have no intention of listing -- the data

on marasmus, senility, lameness, degeneration of organs, for then I would be quoting the book,

whereas my task is only to review it.

Actually, the columns of figures arranged in tabular form for all types of deaths -- those

bodies of children, old people, women, and newborns of all nations and races, bodies present in

spirit behind the numbers -- are not the most sensational part of the book. Having written that

sentence, I ask myself if I am being honest, and I repeat: no, they are not the most sensational.

The enormity of all this human dying is a little like one's own death: it is anticipated, but only

generally and vaguely, the way we comprehend the inevitability of our own end, though we do

not know the form that it will take.

The real immensity of flesh-and-blood life manifests itself on the very first page. The

facts are indisputable. One might indeed entertain doubts about the accuracy of the data in the

chapter on dying: they are based on averages, after all, and it is hard to believe that the taxonomy

and etiology of the deaths were rendered with complete exactitude. But the honest authors do not

conceal from us the possible statistical deviations. Their Introduction thoroughly describes the

methods of calculation and even includes references to the computer programs employed.

Though the methods allow for standard deviations, the latter have no importance for the reader --

what difference does it really make if 7,800 newborns die per minute or 8,100? Besides, these

deviations are insignificant because they tend to cancel one another out. The number of births is

indeed not uniform for all times of the year and day; but since on Earth all times of the day, night,

and year simultaneously coexist, the sum of stillbirths remains constant. Some columns, however,

contain data arrived at by indirect inference. For example, neither the police nor private

murderers -- whether professional or amateur (not counting the ideological variety) -- publish

statistics on the effectiveness of their work. The error in magnitude here can be considerable.

On the other hand, the statistics of Chapter One are beyond reproach. They tell how many

people there are -- and thus how many living human bodies -- in each minute of the 525,600

minutes of the year. How many bodies means: the amount of muscle, bone, bile, blood, saliva,

cerebrospinal fluid, excrement, and so on. Naturally, when the thing to be visualized is of a very

great order of magnitude, a popularizer readily resorts to comparative imagery. The Johnsons do

the same. So, were all humanity taken and crowded together in one place, it would occupy three

hundred billion liters, or a little less than a third of a cubic kilometer. It sounds like a lot. Yet the

world's oceans hold 1,285 million cubic kilometers of water, so if all humanity -- those five

billion bodies -- were cast into the ocean, the water level would rise less than a hundredth of a

millimeter. A single splash, and Earth would be forever unpopulated.

Games of this sort with statistics can rightly be called cheap. They may be meant as a

reminder that we -- who with the might of our industry poisoned the air, the soil, the seas, who

turned jungles into deserts, who exterminated countless species of animals and plants that had

lived for hundreds of millions of years, who reached other planets, and who altered even the

albedo of the Earth, thereby revealing our presence to cosmic observers -- could disappear so

easily and without a trace. However, I was not impressed. Nor was I impressed by the calculation

that 24.9 billion liters of blood could be poured from all mankind and it would not make a Red

Sea, not even a lake.

After this, under an epigraph from T. S. Eliot saying that existence is "birth, and

copulation, and death," come new figures. Every minute, 34.2 million men and women copulate.

Only 5.7 percent of all intercourse results in fertilization, but the combined ejaculate, at a volume

of forty-five thousand liters a minute, contains 1,990 billion (with deviations in the last decimal

place) living spermatozoa. The same number of female eggs could be fertilized sixty times an

hour with a minimal ratio of one spermatozoon to one egg, in which impossible case three million

children would be conceived per second. But this, too, is only a statistical manipulation.

Pornography and our modern life style have accustomed us to the forms of sexual life.

You would think that there was nothing left to reveal, nothing to show that would shock. But,

presented in statistics, it comes as a surprise. Never mind the game of comparisons which is put

to use again: for instance, the stream of sperm, forty-three tons of it, discharged into vaginas per

minute -- its 430,000 hectoliters is compared with the 37,850 hectoliters of boiling water

produced at each eruption of the largest geyser in the world (at Yellowstone). The geyser of

sperm is 11.3 times more abundant and shoots without intermission. The image is not obscene. A

person can be aroused sexually only within a certain range of magnitudes. Acts of copulation,

when shown in great reduction or great enlargement, do not elicit any sexual response. Arousal,

an inborn reaction, occurs as a reflex in certain centers in the brain, and does not manifest itself in

conditions that exceed visual norms. Sexual acts seen in reduced dimensions leave us cold, for

they show creatures the size of ants.

Magnification, on the other hand, arouses disgust, because the smoothest skin of the most

beautiful woman will then look like a porous, pale surface from which protrude hairs as thick as

fangs, while a sticky, glistening grease oozes from the ducts of the sebaceous glands.

The surprise I spoke of has a different cause. Humanity pumps 53.4 billion liters of blood

per minute, but that red river is not surprising; it must flow to sustain life. At the same time,

humanity's male organs eject forty-three tons of semen, and the point is that though each

ejaculation is also an ordinary physiological act, for the individual it is irregular, intimate, not

overly frequent, and even not necessary. Besides, there are millions of old people, children,

voluntary and involuntary celibates, sick people, and so forth. And yet that white stream flows

with the same constancy as the red river system. The irregularity disappears when the statistics

take in the whole Earth, and that is what surprises. People sit down to tables set for dinner, look

for refuse in garbage dumps, pray in chapels, mosques, and churches, fly in planes, ride in cars,

sit in submarines carrying nuclear missiles, debate in parliaments; billions sleep, funeral

processions walk through cemeteries, bombs explode, doctors bend over operating tables,

thousands of college professors simultaneously enter their classrooms, theater curtains lift and

drop, floods swallow fields and houses, wars are waged, bulldozers on battlefields push

uniformed corpses into ditches; it thunders and lightnings, it is night, day, dawn, twilight; but no

matter what happens that forty-three-ton impregnating stream of sperm flows without stop, and

the law of large numbers guarantees that it will be as constant as the sum of solar energy striking

Earth. There is something mechanical about this, inexorable, and animallike. How can one come

to terms with an image of humanity copulating relentlessly through all the cataclysms that befall

it, or that it has brought upon itself?

Well, there you have it. Keep in mind that it is impossible to summarize a book that

reduces human affairs to a minimum -- that is, to numbers (there is no more radical method of

cramming phenomena together). The book itself is an extract, an extreme abbreviation of

humanity. In a review one cannot even touch on the most remarkable chapters. Mental illnesses:

it turns out that today there are more lunatics in any given minute than all the people who lived

on Earth for the last several dozen generations. It is as if all of previous humanity consisted,

today, of madmen. Tumors -- in my first medical work thirty-five years ago I called them a

"somatic insanity," in that they are a suicidal turning of the body upon itself -- are an exception to

life's rule, an error in its dynamics, but that exception, expressed in the statistics, is an enormous

Moloch. The mass of cancerous tissue, calculated per minute, is a testimony to the blindness of

the processes that called us into existence. A few pages farther on are matters even more dreary. I

pass over in silence the chapters on acts of violence, rape, sexual perversion, bizarre cults and

organizations. The picture of what people do to people, to humiliate them, degrade them, exploit

them, whether in sickness, in health, in old age, in childhood, in disability -- and this incessantly,

every minute -- can stun even a confirmed misanthrope who thought he had heard of every

human baseness. But enough of this.

Was this book necessary? A member of the French Academy, writing in Le Monde, said

that it was inevitable, it had to appear. This civilization of ours, he wrote, which measures

everything, counts everything, evaluates everything, weighs everything, which breaks every

commandment and prohibition, desires to know all. But the more populous it becomes, the less

intelligible it is to itself. It throws itself with the most fury at whatever continues to resist it.

There was nothing strange, therefore, in its wanting to have its own portrait, a faithful portrait,

such as never existed, and an objective one -- objectivity being the order of the day. So in the

cause of modern technology it took a photograph like those done with a reporter's flash camera:

without touch-ups.

The old gentleman dodged the question about the need for One Human Minute, saying

that it appeared because, as the product of its time, it had to appear. The question, however,

remains. I would substitute for it another, more modest question: Does this book truly show all of

humanity? The statistical tables are a keyhole, and the reader, a Peeping Tom, spies on the huge

naked body of humanity busy about its everyday affairs. But through a keyhole not everything

can be seen at once. More important, perhaps, is the fact that the observer stands eye to eye, as it

were, not merely with his own species but with its fate. One has to admit that One Human Minute

contains a great deal of impressive anthropological data in the chapters on culture, beliefs, rituals,

and customs, because, although these are numerical agglomerations (or maybe for precisely that

reason), they demonstrate the astonishing diversity of people who are, after all, identical in their

anatomy and physiology. It is curious that the number of languages people employ cannot be

calculated. No one knows precisely how many there are; all we know is that there are over four

thousand. Even the specialists have not identified all of them. The fact that some small ethnic

groups take their languages with them when they die out makes the matter even more difficult to

settle. On top of that, linguists are not in agreement about the status of certain languages,

considered by some to be dialects, by others separate taxonomic entities. Few are the cases,

however, where the Johnsons admit defeat in the conversion of all data to events per minute. Yet

it is just in such cases that one feels -- at least I felt -- a kind of relief. This is a matter with

philosophical roots.

In an elite German literary periodical I came across a review of One Human Minute

written by an angry humanist. The book makes a monster out of mankind, he said, because it has

built a mountain of meat from bodies, blood, and sweat (the measurements include, beyond

excrement and menstrual bleeding, various kinds of sweat, since sweat from fear is different from

sweat from hard work), but it has amputated the heads. One cannot equate the life of the mind

with the number of books and newspapers that people read, or of the words they utter per minute

(an astronomical number). Comparing theater-attendance and television-audience figures with the

constants of death, ejaculation, etc., is not just misleading but a gross error. Neither orgasm nor

death is exclusively and specifically human. What is more, they are largely physiological in

character.

On the other hand, data that are specifically human, such as matters of intellect, are not

exhausted, but neither are they explained by the size of the editions of philosophical journals or

works. It is as if someone were to try to measure the heat of passion with a thermometer, or to

put, under the heading "Acts," both sex acts and acts of faith. This categorical chaos is no

accident, for the authors' intention was precisely to shock the reader with a satire made of

statistics -- to degrade us all under a hail of figures. To be a person means, first of all, to have a

life of the spirit, and not an anatomy subject to addition, division, and multiplication. The very

fact that the life of the spirit cannot be measured and put in statistical form refutes the authors'

claim to have produced a portrait of humanity. In this bookkeeper's breakdown of billions of

people into functional pieces to fit under headings, one sees the efficiency of a pathologist

dissecting a corpse. Perhaps there is even malice. Indeed, among the thousands of index entries

there is nothing at all resembling "human dignity."

Another critic also struck at the philosophical roots I mentioned. I have the impression (I

say this parenthetically) that One Human Minute threw the intellectuals into confusion. They felt

that they had the right to ignore such products of mass culture as the Guinness Book, but One

Human Minute confounded them. For the Johnsons -- whether they are cautious or only cunning -

- raised their work to a much higher level with a methodical, scholarly introduction. They

anticipated many objections, citing contemporary thinkers who call truth the prime value in

society. If that is so, then all truth, even the most depressing, is permissible and even necessary.

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OneHumanMinutebyStanislawLemTranslatedbyCatherineS.Leacha.b.e-bookv3.0/NotesatEOFBackCover:Inthreescathinglyhumorousreviewsofnot-yet-writtenbooks,StanislawLembringsusinsightsintothelifeofthe21stcentury."OneHumanMinute"summarizestheactivitiesofeverypersononearthduringasingleminute."TheUpside-DownEvol...

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Stanislaw Lem - One Human Minute

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