It’s the biggest elephant of all in every room that’s ever been and we never, ever, speak of it: I refer, of course, to the mystery of our origins.
When my sentences grow long and baroquely complex you can be sure I have nothing to say
Oh, we all have theories—evolution, Eden, alien spores—and we argue about them vigorously and endlessly, but what we never acknowledge is that none of us know. The creation was not televised and fossil evidence will never be conclusive. So far as we know we are alone in all the cosmos, the only self-aware tool users who have ever been, and we have not one shred of admissible evidence explaining how we got this way, or what it all means, or if it means anything at all, at all. As a species we are orphans, left to raise ourselves and with no monogrammed swaddling blanket to look to for a clue.
And you know what? It matters. For just as an orphan will spin fantasies about his noble unknown lineage, or fear that he is of low caste, mongrel birth, so we naked apes imagine we are Sons of God or consign ourselves to being freaks of chemical chance, with no guarantee that the flame lit by chance will not flicker and die.
When my sentences grow long and baroquely complex you can be sure I have nothing, really, to say and am hoping to drown you in syllables. So let me, for once, be brief and clear: I don’t know where we come from either. But I am deeply certain that the tale of our beginning is stranger and more beautiful than anything we have yet conceived.
Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I tend to come to the same conclusion you do. But even if it’s mere chance that we’re here and god is just a figment of our imagination, that’s still pretty damn amazing. And that’s fine by me–what a ride!
Strangely, I am more concerned with where we are going, rather than where we have been, who started it and “WHY?”.
“Ego, gonads and intellect aside, what does your heart have to say?”