To me, the less intelligent reader, this should be the core idea and content of the book, as in the text: Research shows that people say stupid things a lot of times.
To that end, author Lem created a futuristic encyclopedia called Westland, with idioms and crap machines that could deduce typical human expression patterns more than 20 years later.
The author also commented on this future encyclopedia, which is a completely unreadable book, and no one understands it, not even nobel laureates.
I was coaxed into this set of baby-like enigmatic texts. After reading the whole book, it seems to understand the intention of the author Lem (it does not matter if it is wrong), for the future, for the universe, "do not understand" is the eternal theme.
The super-intelligent existence like the robot clay man XIV in the book is also "not understood", but it knows a little more than ordinary people, although this little distance is difficult for humans to reach, but compared with the universe, it is still a drop in the ocean.
The Clay Man ultimately chose eternal silence, which in the eyes of mankind is self-extinction, but for it, this is the beginning of an eternal journey. Even if Clay Man XIV painstakingly makes all kinds of metaphors, trying to make its audience understand its cognition, the situation is that I, the reader, should not be considered its ideal audience.
In its cloudy and foggy explanation, one can only reflect on how simple human beings are over and over again.
Why does it exist? Why doesn't the universe have an echo? Why can people create something much more powerful than themselves, and is this really created by humans? Since we can create human beings and create wisdom, why do human beings want to live forever and be free from all diseases, but it is as difficult as ascending to heaven? Will humans understand so many questions?
Clay Man XIV should tell us that we will not answer all the questions until death, the category of agnosticism. Although the world and the universe can never be exhausted, this is not a reason to be complacent, it is still willing to move forward.
Perhaps in the eyes of the clay man who has long been "extinct", the long speech behavior of the clay man fourteen is also a nerd.
However, if someone is willing to tell the ant about the mountains and rivers he has visited, it should not be meaningless to that person. The words of a little madman who is not hurtful?
Unlike most books, even if I define the harvest of this book as "unintelligible" wisdom, it is better to understand Lem's ultimate self-analysis and world cognition in his half-joking and half-serious words.
For example, from the beginning of the book, "On Fabrication" is a short essay of only one page written by Lem himself, and he tried not to write such boring words as "The Marquise left the house at five o'clock", but he wrote it anyway, and dissected the sentence he did not want to write. But this matter has to make people wonder whether it is also boring and empty.
For example, in the introduction to the book, Lem discusses the importance of the "introduction" of the book in particular, like an old man sitting precariously, on an occasion he thinks is appropriate, chattering about the old man he has experienced in his life.
……
In this way, I also said a lot of nonsense, some of which are useful, some of which are useless, and will be said later, but perhaps not again.