Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

positive traits. Perhaps Thal, he said, was a man graced with good qualities, and H. sapiens, in his plunder and advance toward the devastating dawn of agriculture, was a man with no such grace, a man without qualities, who substituted violence for the hole at the center of his heart.

Going private meant a rogue world where you didn’t have backup. You didn’t even know who you were working for.

But I am convinced, he said, that the way to break free of what we are is to find out who we might have been, and to try to restore some kernel of our lost essence.