Playground

by Richard Powers

I was a precocious four-year-old when I realized that my parents were locked in a contest to inflict as much harm on each other as possible without crossing over the line into fatality—just enough pure pain to trigger the excitement that only rage could bring. It was a kind of reciprocal autoerotic strangulation of the soul, and both parties were generous givers and grateful recipients.

She had never felt at home up there, above the surface, with its noise and politics and relentless verticality. She had been made for water, gliding through a place edgeless and muffled, free of the blows that had always assaulted her in the world of air.

To give the smallest hint of creatures so varied and inventive and otherworldly that they might compel humility and stop human progress in its tracks with awe.

Years of study had convinced Evelyne that mantas were far smarter than the world suspected. She had spent too many decades of close observation to be cowed any longer by the prohibition against anthropomorphism. What began, centuries ago, as a healthy safeguard against projection had become an insidious contributor to human exceptionalism, the belief that nothing else on Earth was like us in any way. At her age, Evelyne Beaulieu had no more time for demure self-censorship.

Nothing in life matched a game of catch between cousins whose last common ancestor had lived 440 million years ago.

She had found the secret of liberty and of life: disguise yourself and do what you need to. And all she needed was to dive.

Evelyne Beaulieu stood on the edge of the North American continent, feeling the great wave of her future curling over her and knocking her into the sand. And she rose from the froth howling, wanting more.

She turned her head in both directions. The shore ran forever, leaving her in the dead center of a globe-sized paperweight. Bliss was so simple. Just hold still and look.

There was so much to life, too much, more than Beaulieu could do justice to, more than any living thing could guess at or merit. She loved it all, even humans, for without the miracle of human consciousness, love for such a world would be just one more of a billion unnamed impulses.

Add that to your table of definitions for what it means to be a human being. We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.

‘The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’ William Blake.”

“It says, Welcome home, Mommie. Please come back and stay with us on dry land.” Something went out of Evelyne. Her heart thudded against her lungs like the long snout of the butterfly fish ramming the window of the Tektite, trying to figure out what blocked the way. “I’m here, sweet one,” she told her daughter. “Here to stay.” Although it felt as if staying for long would be her death.

My father

He worships, worships, worships me, but I scare the shit out of him because he knows I don’t believe in his world, and he’ll never understand mine.”

“Aristotle said that happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate spot.”

“If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit. Either choice can have your belief. It doesn’t matter which you choose. You shed one chooser and grow into another.”

The need to solve an intricate puzzle and the need to quiet your brain are twin sons of different mothers.

diving was the only time she was not going somewhere else, the only time she was happy inside her body and at ease in the world.

There was no such ending. Hope and truth could not be reconciled. The things that had filled her with awe were passing away. There was no other honest ending.

even now, in what felt like the end-time, ninety-nine percent of the world’s available living space was stranger than they knew how to imagine.

I won’t live to see the blow you’ll inflict on human thought, the damage you’ll do to our self-image, the mayhem you and your offspring will wage on human culture, the power you’ll scatter. I can’t begin to imagine what further creatures you’ll give birth to. Already I’m ruined by the ones you’ve made for me.