Playground

by Richard Powers

The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting.

The course of civilization is carved in ocean currents. Where sea layers mix, where rains travel or wastelands spread, where great upwellings bring deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters to the energy-bathed surface and fish go mad with fecundity, where soils turn fertile or anemic, where temperatures turn habitable or harsh, where trade routes flourish or fail: all this the global ocean engine determines. The fate of continents is written in water. And sometimes great cities owe their existence to tiny ocean islands.

Play was evolution’s way of building brains, and any creature with a brain as developed as a giant oceanic manta sure used it. If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play.

Life was beyond belief, beyond the capacity for belief that life itself had tinkered into being.

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.

Of all the things we humans excel at, moving the goalposts may be our best trick.

“It’s good,” I said, not understanding it. “Why are you so hard on yourself?” “Because God has been too easy on me.”

She loved women. But there were all kinds of things she loved and could not have. Best to have the things that already overwhelmed her with their amplitude, the things she already could never exhaust. She had the ocean. And the ocean absorbed all her hope and excitement, all her panic and pain and love, into a place far larger than anything human.