Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.
“They can drive a car thirty miles every day and feel good about themselves for recycling a couple of empty jam jars. They can talk about peace being a good thing yet glorify war. They can despise the man who kills his wife in rage but worship the indifferent soldier who drops a bomb killing a hundred children.”
Sometimes, to be yourself you will have to forget yourself and become something else. Your character is not a fixed thing. You will sometimes have to move to keep up with it.
In a thousand years, if humans survive that long, everything you know will have been disproved. And replaced by even bigger myths.
On Earth, incidentally, civilization is the result of a group of humans coming together and suppressing their instincts.
Suddenly it made me realize why religion was such a big thing around here. Because, yes, sure, God could not exist. But then neither could humans.
Laughter, along with madness, seemed to be the only way out, the emergency exit for humans.
Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.
Magazines are very popular, despite no human’s ever feeling better for having read them. Indeed, their chief purpose is to generate a sense of inferiority in the reader that consequently leads to a feeling of needing to buy something, which the humans then do, and then feel even worse, and so need to buy another magazine to see what they can buy next. It is an eternal and unhappy spiral that goes by the name of capitalism, and it is really quite popular.
Maybe that is what beauty was, for humans. Accidents, imperfections, placed inside a pretty pattern. The defiance of mathematics.
That’s what starts to happen, when you know it is possible for you to feel pain you have no control over. You become vulnerable. Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from. And that, for me, was very bad news indeed.
Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other people, who had failed in their choices and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers.
A Homo sapiens was a primitive hunter who had woken each day with the knowledge he could kill. And now, the equivalent knowledge was only that he would wake up each day and buy something.
Oh, and let’s not forget the Things They Do to Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This is an infinite list. It includes shopping, watching TV, taking the better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semiautobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old, and harboring a vague desire to believe there might be a meaning to it all.
Human life, I realized, got progressively worse as you got older, by the sound of things. You arrived, with baby feet and hands and infinite happiness, and then the happiness slowly evaporated as your feet and hands grew bigger.
As a black hole forms, it creates an immense gamma-ray burst, blinding whole galaxies with light and destroying millions of worlds. You could disappear at any second. Or this one. Or this one. Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.
Alcohol in the evening is very enjoyable. Hangovers in the morning are very unpleasant. At some point you have to choose: evenings or mornings. If you are laughing, check that you don’t really want to cry. And vice versa.
Humans were always doing things they didn’t like doing. In fact, to my best estimate, at any one time only point three percent of humans were actively doing something they liked doing, and even when they did so, they felt an intense guilt about it and were fervently promising themselves they’d be back doing something horrendously unpleasant very shortly.
To be a human is to state the obvious. Repeatedly, over and over, until the end of time.
I realized that if getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.