"A great composer, asked once what the meaning of one of his symphonies was, replied: ' While I was creating it, the only ones who knew its purpose were God and I . Now, God only knows.'
It hasn't been that long since I finished writing Rabies, and I think I still know why I have written this book, and why it was written in this particular format.
Let's open the door now, with the story as our key, and enter into the room that holds the true meaning of this novel.
The Heathrow airport, London, is the breakout point of hydrophobia, the canine rabies, caused by a lab strain, or how we like to say it nowadays - the reprogramming of the natural rabies virus, by its clinical outcome the deadliest disease known to human kind, at least until now.
The airport is quarantined away from the world and the war against this rabies virus starts. The unfortunate end is there to prevent London and the rest of the world from catching this disease, and only one creature survives the outbreak ant its aftermath. *
The world is not saved.
If our only task in this and similar lethal outbreak cases was only finding the cure against the disease, then the outcome might have still been a hopeful one. The cure, even if only provisional, is always found. Humanity has so far managed to survive even the cursed Black Death that at its peak wiped away a third of the Europeans.
The battle is not fought against this rabies, such as it is.
The illness causes another kind of rabies in us, the kind under whose shadow we live our lives, the kind of rabies we read, listen and learn about, the kind of it that we have to face in both our lives and our history - the rabies that each and every one of us carries inside.
This other rabies is the trademark disease of our civilization and fight against it is futile.
To win the battle against it, we would have to rewrite our story of the humanity from the very beginning, and change the foundation of our civilization, because the other rabies disease has been a part of the natural process of development of conscious thought in humans, right from the times when first tools were used instead of hands to work (and are likely, soon, to take the place of our minds and souls also).
Victory over our intrinsic rabies is obviously - impossible.
Progress is, because of the disease it carries inside, akin to perfecting of a civilization whose starting point and basic assumptions are wrong. With every new assessment and correction of the mistakes we are just reshaping the troubles.
Since this reshaping is the only thing left to do, in a way, at some level, it must, be a strategy that is good for us.
Hope, if there is any, lies in the odd chance, something that the human mind cannot predict or imagine, in the fact that the only possible salvation of entire human kind is in a twist of fate that we are unable to create or attempt to achieve but must wait for it to happen, because any other defense that we the humans have come up with through conscious efforts is here for us to see, and unfortunately, experience.
In this age of progress and discoveries, in the century of the humanism, we are feeling less and less secure, our fears are growing bigger and bigger, our confusion is getting deeper, and our powerlessness is becoming more and more obvious.
We have reached the point where now, the more we know, or more we think we know, the more we are driven to kill, destroy, to deprive others more efficiently, faster and with even less reasons then back in the days when the Krapina Neanderthal fought for his survival.
Back then the need to kill was justified, it didn’t happen for ideals like today, back then the slavery was product of brute force and not love and admiration like it happens now.
The most frightening thing is not the fact that our wars have, through the lessened degree of sense we put into mass murder – if sense to mass murder is possible at all to be attributed ever – started taking more lives.
The thing that scares the most is the fact that our peace has become manic, irrational, and bloodier than any war.
Rabies is the world the way I see it. The theme of this novel is not the disease, but what we consider to be our healthy state of mind.
‘We are the rabid ones’, one of the characters states,’ they are merely ill ’.
Each character has their own, individual human version of rabies that makes them suffer, long before they fall victim to the canine strain and die.
No, the story is not happy at all, but happy stories are not suitable for those among us who wish to remain hopeful at any cost. Hope matters, but not the one that comes without a price tag, especially if the price tag that is hidden is the cost of us closing our eyes shut when facing the reality of our world.
Only the hope that that knows what it is up against can bring us back to life – any other sort is what keeps us dead inside."
Borislav Pekic, diary entry September 1983, London.**
*spoiler sentence edited out
** 'Rabies’ the novel was first published in 1983 in Serbian
It hasn't been that long since I finished writing Rabies, and I think I still know why I have written this book, and why it was written in this particular format.
Let's open the door now, with the story as our key, and enter into the room that holds the true meaning of this novel.
The Heathrow airport, London, is the breakout point of hydrophobia, the canine rabies, caused by a lab strain, or how we like to say it nowadays - the reprogramming of the natural rabies virus, by its clinical outcome the deadliest disease known to human kind, at least until now.
The airport is quarantined away from the world and the war against this rabies virus starts. The unfortunate end is there to prevent London and the rest of the world from catching this disease, and only one creature survives the outbreak ant its aftermath. *
The world is not saved.
If our only task in this and similar lethal outbreak cases was only finding the cure against the disease, then the outcome might have still been a hopeful one. The cure, even if only provisional, is always found. Humanity has so far managed to survive even the cursed Black Death that at its peak wiped away a third of the Europeans.
The battle is not fought against this rabies, such as it is.
The illness causes another kind of rabies in us, the kind under whose shadow we live our lives, the kind of rabies we read, listen and learn about, the kind of it that we have to face in both our lives and our history - the rabies that each and every one of us carries inside.
This other rabies is the trademark disease of our civilization and fight against it is futile.
To win the battle against it, we would have to rewrite our story of the humanity from the very beginning, and change the foundation of our civilization, because the other rabies disease has been a part of the natural process of development of conscious thought in humans, right from the times when first tools were used instead of hands to work (and are likely, soon, to take the place of our minds and souls also).
Victory over our intrinsic rabies is obviously - impossible.
Progress is, because of the disease it carries inside, akin to perfecting of a civilization whose starting point and basic assumptions are wrong. With every new assessment and correction of the mistakes we are just reshaping the troubles.
Since this reshaping is the only thing left to do, in a way, at some level, it must, be a strategy that is good for us.
Hope, if there is any, lies in the odd chance, something that the human mind cannot predict or imagine, in the fact that the only possible salvation of entire human kind is in a twist of fate that we are unable to create or attempt to achieve but must wait for it to happen, because any other defense that we the humans have come up with through conscious efforts is here for us to see, and unfortunately, experience.
In this age of progress and discoveries, in the century of the humanism, we are feeling less and less secure, our fears are growing bigger and bigger, our confusion is getting deeper, and our powerlessness is becoming more and more obvious.
We have reached the point where now, the more we know, or more we think we know, the more we are driven to kill, destroy, to deprive others more efficiently, faster and with even less reasons then back in the days when the Krapina Neanderthal fought for his survival.
Back then the need to kill was justified, it didn’t happen for ideals like today, back then the slavery was product of brute force and not love and admiration like it happens now.
The most frightening thing is not the fact that our wars have, through the lessened degree of sense we put into mass murder – if sense to mass murder is possible at all to be attributed ever – started taking more lives.
The thing that scares the most is the fact that our peace has become manic, irrational, and bloodier than any war.
Rabies is the world the way I see it. The theme of this novel is not the disease, but what we consider to be our healthy state of mind.
‘We are the rabid ones’, one of the characters states,’ they are merely ill ’.
Each character has their own, individual human version of rabies that makes them suffer, long before they fall victim to the canine strain and die.
No, the story is not happy at all, but happy stories are not suitable for those among us who wish to remain hopeful at any cost. Hope matters, but not the one that comes without a price tag, especially if the price tag that is hidden is the cost of us closing our eyes shut when facing the reality of our world.
Only the hope that that knows what it is up against can bring us back to life – any other sort is what keeps us dead inside."
Borislav Pekic, diary entry September 1983, London.**
*spoiler sentence edited out
** 'Rabies’ the novel was first published in 1983 in Serbian
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