Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom, as one of my high school biology teachers used to say. That belief, that transcendence, was held within this organ itself. Infinite, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical. I had traded the Pentecostalism of my childhood for this new religion, this new quest, knowing that I would never fully know.

In college, I had been shy and awkward, still molting the skin of a Christianity that insisted I save myself for marriage, that left me fearful of men and of my body.

We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else,

I wanted to flay any mental weakness off my body like fascia from muscle.

mother must have been feeling. If I’ve thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remind myself what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound. And what a wound my father leaving was.

Buzz says that Christianity is a cult except that it started so long ago that people didn’t know what cults were yet.

Literalism is helpful in the fight against change.

We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn’t change, but we do.

as though we were living in a world of logic, where time moved in orderly, straightforward ways, instead of here, in the zigzagged upside-down world.

All you have to do is watch a child ride her bike directly into a brick wall or jump from the tallest branch of a sycamore tree to know that we humans are reckless with our bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully.