The Humans

by Matt Haig

‘Gulliver,’ I told him, ‘you fell off a roof yesterday. That boy is not a forty-foot drop. There is nothing to him. No depth. You know how he is going to fight.’

Some humans not only liked violence, but craved it, I realised. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted away from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.

They only had Saturdays, because Mondays were a little bit too close to Sundays for Sunday’s liking, as if Monday were a collapsed star in the week’s solar system, with an excessive gravitational pull. In other words one seventh of human days worked quite well. The other six weren’t very good, and five of those were roughly the same day stuck on repeat.

I looked at the transparent yellow liquid in the glass. I tasted it and tasted fermentation. In other words I tasted life on Earth. For everything that lives here ferments, ages, becomes diseased. But as things made their decline from ripeness they could taste wonderful, I realised.

I looked at Isobel and I saw a miracle. It was ridiculous, I know. But a human, in its own small way, was a kind of miraculous achievement, in mathematical terms.

She had then tried to uncover the woman’s place in this history, and it had been difficult because history had always been written by the victors of wars, and the victors of the gender wars had always been male, and so women had been placed in the margins and in the footnotes, if they had been lucky.

‘Byzantine empresses gave birth in the Purple Chamber. Their babies were given the honorary title “Porphyrogenitos” which meant “Born to the Purple” to separate them from riff-raff generals who won the throne through going to war. But then, in Japan, purple is the colour of death.’

One of the brighter humans, a German-born theoretical physicist called Albert Einstein, explained relativity to dimmer members of his species by telling them: ‘Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.’ What if looking at the pretty girl felt like putting your hand on a hot stove? What was that? Quantum mechanics?

‘Are you scared of death?’ She looked awkward. ‘Of course, I’m scared to death of death. I’m a lapsed Catholic. Death and guilt. That’s all I have.’ Catholicism, I discovered, was a type of Christianity for humans who like gold leaf, Latin and guilt.

‘I love you,’ she said. And I knew the point of love right then. The point of love was to help you survive.

‘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.’

‘You cannot kill a mother’s son without killing the mother.’

In every life there is a moment. A crisis. One that says: what I believe is wrong. It happens to everyone, the only difference is how that knowledge changes them.

The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change. I was something. And now I am something else.

Because happiness is possible for me now. It exists on the other side of the hurt.

Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.

To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilisation advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunise yourself with art. And love.

Men are not from Mars. Women are not from Venus. Do not fall for categories. Everyone is everything. Every ingredient inside a star is inside you, and every personality that ever existed competes in the theatre of your mind for the main role.

If you have children and love one more than another, work at it. They will know, even if it’s by a single atom less. A single atom is all you need to make a very big explosion.

And I walked across the gravel, towards the road and somewhere in the universe of my soul a fiery, life-giving star collapsed, and a very black hole began to form.

This was, I realised, a beautiful planet. Maybe it was the most beautiful of all. But beauty creates its own troubles. You look at a waterfall or an ocean or a sunset and you find yourself wanting to share it with someone. ‘Beauty—be not caused—,’ said Emily Dickinson. ‘It is.’

The scattering of light over a long distance creates a sunset. The crashing of ocean waves on a beach is created by tides which are themselves the result of gravitational forces exerted by the sun and the moon and the rotation of the Earth. Those are causes.

I was like a sun. I was a long way from where I started. And I have changed. Once I thought I could pass through time like a neutrino passes through matter, effortlessly and without stopping to think, because time would never run out.