The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam, #2)

by Margaret Atwood

Ours is a fall into greed: why do we think that everything on Earth belongs to us, while in reality we belong to Everything? We have betrayed the trust of the Animals, and defiled our sacred task of stewardship.

Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody — a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.

Let us remember: It is better to hope than to mope!

Then God says a noteworthy thing. He says, “And the fear of you” — that is, Man — “and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air … into your hand are they delivered.” Genesis 9:2. This is not God telling Man that he has a right to destroy all the Animals, as some claim. Instead it is a warning to God’s beloved Creatures: Beware of Man, and of his evil heart.

May I remind you all about the importance of hand-washing, seven times a day at least, and after every encounter with a stranger. It is never too early to practise this essential precaution. Avoid anyone who is sneezing. Let us sing.

A swarm of bees in May, worth a cool day. A swarm of bees in June, worth a new moon. A swarm of bees in July, not worth a squashed fly.

Thus the time passed. Toby stopped counting it. In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float.

The Gardeners were expected to avoid any broadcasting of their personal problems: foisting your mental junk on others was frowned on. For drinking Life there are two cups, Nuala taught the small children. What’s in each of them might be exactly the same, but my, oh my, the taste is so different! The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy — Now, which one would you rather have in your tummy?

Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don’t really care about them all that much? I don’t know why, but it’s true.

How misguided were our ancestors in their preserving of corpses — their embalmings, their adornings, their encasings in mausoleums. What a horror — to turn the Soul’s husk into an unholy fetish! And, in the end, how selfish! Shall we not repay the gift of Life by regifting ourselves to Life when the time comes?

Something about a bunch of trees made people think they could cut loose. “Wherever there’s Nature, there’s assholes,” he said cheerfully.

According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.

The sands of time are quicksands, said Adam One. So much can sink into them without a trace. And what a blessing when those things that sink away are needless worries.

One day, he said that what you had to do in any adversarial situation was to kill the king, as in chess. I said people didn’t have kings any more. He said he meant the centre of power, but today it wouldn’t be a single person, it would be the technological connections. I said, you mean like coding and splicing, and he said, “Something like that.”

Adam One used to say that people can believe two opposite things at the same time, and now I knew it was true.

Oh, would I were, like Serpents, wise — To sense the wholeness of the Whole, Not only with a thinking Brain, But with a swift and ardent Soul.

In the afternoon she takes a nap. An old moon draws the past, said Pilar: whatever arrives from the shadows you must greet as a blessing. And the past does come back to her: the white frame house of her childhood, the ordinary trees, the woodland in the background, tinged with blue as if there’s haze. A deer is outlined against it, standing rigid as a lawn ornament, ears pricked. Her father’s digging with a shovel, over by the pile of picket fencing; her mother’s a momentary glimpse at the kitchen window. Perhaps she’s making soup. Everything tranquil, as if it would never end. But where is Toby in this picture? For it is a picture. It’s flat, like a picture on a wall. She’s not there. She opens her eyes: tears on her cheeks. I wasn’t in the picture because I’m the frame, she thinks. It’s not really the past. It’s only me, holding it all together. It’s only a handful of fading neural pathways. It’s only a mirage. Surely I was an optimistic person back then, she thinks. Back there. I woke up whistling. I knew there were things wrong in the world, they were referred to, I’d seen them in the onscreen news. But the wrong things were wrong somewhere else. By the time she’d reached college, the wrongness had moved closer. She remembers the oppressive sensation, like waiting all the time for a heavy stone footfall, then the knock at the door. Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both...

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

But still frightened, because when might the whole problem — the whole thing — start happening to them again? The whole signs-of-mortality thing. The whole thing thing. Nobody likes it, thought Toby — being a body, a thing. Nobody wants to be limited in that way. We’d rather have wings. Even the word flesh has a mushy sound to it.

If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she’d be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death’s a sure-fire method for stopping time.

And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing.

Everyone’s too sad for everything.”

Jealousy is a very destructive emotion, Adam One used to say. It’s part of the stubborn Australopithecine heritage we’re stuck with. It eats away at you and deadens your Spiritual life, but also it leads you to hatred, and causes you to harm others.

Maybe that’s what love is, I thought: it’s being pissed off.

What is it about our own Species that leaves us so vulnerable to the impulse to violence? Why are we so addicted to the shedding of blood? Whenever we are tempted to become puffed up, and to see ourselves as superior to all other Animals, we should reflect on our own brutal history.

For when a Species dies from Earth, We die a little too.

Glenn used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, “I’ll be dead,” you’ve said the word I, and so you’re still alive inside the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul — it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there’s a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don’t know, and that’s what God is. It’s what you don’t know — the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: it’s knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it’s an essential part of us, like water.

Whenever you thanked Amanda for something she pretended not to hear; or else she’d say, “You’ll pay me back.” That’s what she said now. She wanted everything to be a trade, because giving things for nothing was too soft.

Just remember, dear Friends: What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

Nature full strength is more than we can take, Adam One used to say. It’s a potent hallucinogen, a soporific, for the untrained Soul. We’re no longer at home in it. We need to dilute it. We can’t drink it straight. And God is the same. Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.

Should your life be required of you, rest assured that it is required by Life.

Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering, Mine! Mine!

Farewell is the song Time sings, Adam One used to say.

Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it’s smarter than you.

“Needs must when the devil drives,”

The Human moral keyboard is limited, Adam One used to say: there’s nothing you can play on it that hasn’t been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.

Man alone seeks Vengefulness, And writes his abstract Laws on stone; For this false Justice he has made, He tortures limb and crushes bone. Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? Oh, if Revenge did move the stars Instead of Love, they would not shine.

Give up your anger and your spite, And imitate the Deer, the Tree; In sweet Forgiveness find your joy, For it alone can set you free.