macksting

Yesterday I had been putting off a crying jag most of the day. No specific cause. Once I had a room to myself and privacy, it was probably inevitable. Still, it's a little vindicating that my brain decided it was going to break down over Roadside Picnic.

What is Roadside Picnic, you ask?

Wikipedia:

Roadside Picnic (Russian: Пикник на обочине, Piknik na obochine, IPA: [pʲɪkˈnʲik nɐ ɐˈbotɕɪnʲe]) is a science fiction novel by Soviet-Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, written in 1971 and published in 1972. The story leads among other works of the authors on the number of translations into foreign languages and publications outside the former Soviet Union. As of 2003, Boris Strugatsky has counted 55 publications of "Picnic" in 22 countries.[1]

(...) Roadside Picnic is a work of fiction based on the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event called the Visitation that simultaneously took place in half a dozen separate locations around Earth over a two-day period. Neither the Visitors themselves nor their means of arrival or departure were ever seen by the local populations who lived inside the relatively small areas, each a few square kilometers, of the six Visitation Zones. The zones exhibit strange and dangerous phenomena not understood by humans, and contain artifacts with inexplicable, seemingly supernatural properties.

The title of the story comes from a scene in the middle where Dr. Pilman, introduced in the first page and hardly brought up again, is being buttonholed by Richard, a poor schlub who's in over his head. This fellow's job is to control and stop the flow of artifacts from the Visitation Zones, because frankly they're an unknowable hazard. He slowly realizes he can't. Which leads him, understandably, to ask what the hell this all means anyway. So he grabs Dr. Pilman, a rather philosophical and rambling scientist, and plies him with booze and starts asking, why did this happen? Where's it all going? What will happen next? Why did they come here, and when will they come back?

And Pilman says, we can't know.

"What do you think about the Visitation? You can answer unseriously."
"All right, I’ll tell you. But I must warn you that your question, Richard, comes under the heading of xenology. Xenology: an unnatural mixture of science fictionand formal logic. It’s based on the false premise that human psychology is applicable to extraterrestrial intelligent beings."

Sort of the opposite approach of Love Is The Plan The Plan Is Death here. Where LITP lays out a situation with nonhumans who we can understand and sympathize with, Roadside Picnic instead lays out a situation where what it means to be human is questioned, and not satisfactorily answered; where why we do what we do is left an open question, but with a few incautious stabs at answers.
Over the course of the conversation, Richard and Pilman, increasingly intoxicated, examine and throw out such lofty answers as "man is the animal who thinks."
The closest Pilman gets, reaching drunkenly for something comforting after accidentally making Richard's sense of helplessness worse than before, is,

"Wait a minute," Valentine said. "Listen: ’You ask me what makes man great?’"he quoted. "’That he re-created nature? That he has harnessed cosmic forces? That in a brief time he conquered the planet and opened a window on the universe? No! That, despite all this, he has survived and intends to survive in the future.’"

He doesn't commit to it, but it's an answer he's willing to throw out there and not immediately dismiss. That a human is an animal that intends to survive.
But the end of the book is, if anything, kinder.
Red is the lead character of the book, the "stalker" (that is, hunter) of artifacts of the Visitation Zones who has been most single-handedly impressive in his ability to get in, get something, and get out alive and unscathed. He can't guarantee the safety of those who go in with him per se, or at least I don't think in good conscience he would make that promise. It hasn't always gone well.
There's a thing, a golden ball, or perhaps some other color. It's oft-rumored. It's said it can grant any wish you make.
He has evidence enough that something can make miracles. He's met those miracles. He's met the people who paid the price for the person on whose behalf those miracles have been made. One of them even lived.
And he curses himself for not having the words to make the wish to make it all better.

"I am an animal, you see that. I don’t have the words, they didn’t teach me the words. I don’t know how to think, the bastards didn’t let me learn how to think. But if you really are... all-powerful... all-knowing... then you figure it out! Look into my heart. I know that everything you need is in there. It has to be. I never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! You take from me what it is I want... it just can’t be that I would want something bad! Damnit all, I can’t think of anything, except those words of his... ’HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!’"

This, too, is human.

To want something right, to want something better than the life we have, not just for us but for everyone. To see that it is wrong, and to try to make it right. But not to know precisely what that is.
That's not survival, that's not even intent, whether to survive or not. In that scene he's not even seeking his own survival. In all likelihood, he will die there, having angrily communicated his point as best he can: that this can't go on, that it can be better, and that he is ill-qualified to be the one to make it so, yet here he is.
That's the last line in the book, shouted at the golden ball. ’HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!’ And that's the line that always makes me cry.