The Humans

by Matt Haig

Humans, as a rule, don’t like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead.

Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.

On Earth, incidentally, civilization is the result of a group of humans coming together and suppressing their instincts.

Indeed, war and money seemed to be so popular on the news, it should more accurately have been titled The War and Money Show.

It seemed people didn’t mind someone’s being naked in a rain forest so long as it was nowhere near their lawn.

He was fifteen years old. This meant he belonged to a special subcategory of human called a “teenager,” the chief characteristics of which were a weakened resistance to gravity, a vocabulary of grunts, a lack of spatial awareness, copious amounts of masturbation, and an unending appetite for cereal.

As well as religion, human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism, homophobia, class snobbery, environmental destruction, slavery, totalitarianism, military dictatorships, inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon), the victimization of clever people, the worshipping of idiotic people, boredom, despair, periodic collapses, and catastrophes within the psychic landscape. And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.

She smiled too, but it was a smile on top of something else. As if she were wearing a mask and there was a near-identical but less smiling face underneath.

As I did so, I thought of the startling capacity for belief inherent in this species. Even before I had fully discovered the concepts of astrology, homeopathy, organized religion, and probiotic yogurts, I was able to work out that what humans may have lacked in physical attractiveness, they made up for in gullibility.

(A cat, I discovered, was very much like a dog. But smaller, and without the self-esteem issues.)

This is what dogs liked to do, I discovered. They liked to run around on grass, pretending they were free, shouting, “We’re free, we’re free, look, look, look how free we are!” at each other. It really was a sorry sight. But, I had to admit, it worked for them, and for Newton in particular. It was a collective illusion they had chosen to swallow and they were submitting to it wholeheartedly, without any nostalgia for their former wolf selves.

It was frustrating. You see, the language of words was only one of the human languages. There were many others, as I have pointed out. The language of sighs, the language of silent moments, and most significantly, the language of frowns.

Just as dogs were thwarted wolves, parks were thwarted forests. Humans loved both, possibly because humans were, well, thwarted. The flowers were beautiful. Flowers, after love, must have been the best advertisement planet Earth had going for it.

A leaf fell and landed on my lap. It was dead and brown. I held it and, quite out of character, felt a strange empathy. Maybe it was because now that I was empathizing with humans, I could empathize with pretty much anything. Too much Emily Dickinson, that was the problem.

The girls were silent but still chewed, if only at half speed. Cow speed.

Love is what the humans are all about but they don’t understand it. If they understood it, then it would disappear.

Catholic, I discovered, meant a type of Christianity for humans who like gold leaf, Latin, and guilt.

The “pub” was an invention of humans living in England, designed as compensation for the fact that they were humans living in England.

Laughter, I realized, was the reverberating sound of a truth hitting a lie.

When you watch the news and see members of your species in turmoil, do not think there is nothing you can do. But know it is not done by watching news.

The thing with black holes, of course, is that they are really very neat and tidy. There is no mess inside a black hole. All the disordered stuff that goes through the event horizon, all that in-falling matter and radiation, is compressed to the smallest state it can possibly be. A state that might easily be called nothing at all.