The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [130]
drunk, a bit too much punch singing in my veins, and my head wobbled groggily on top of my shoulders. It was a new moon, giving us perfect darkness to see the stars in. We came to a point at which Clever decided—following either a random decision or some unknown or arcane cue that remained invisible to me—to suddenly flop himself down in the grass and look up at the sky. I dropped down next to him. We were close enough to the house that we could see the lights in its windows and distantly hear the humans talking, but far enough away that we felt quite alone together, out here in the night, lying in this field. We heard a wire-thin crackle of coyote laughter from somewhere far away in the mountains. We gazed up together at the thousands and thousands of stars exploding across the clear sky of that moonless Colorado night in spring. It wasn’t cold out, but it wasn’t very warm, either. I think I may have even caught a cold, lying drunk in the field with Clever that night. We watched the sky until we could see the dim dots of satellites traverse it in the spaces of darkness between the stars. It caused me to think about space and time and the universe. There are two kinds of awe, I thought, and may have said so to Clever, who may have looked at me, mutely shrugged, and looked back at the stars. One kind of awe is what I feel when I look up into a clear night sky like this one. The other kind of awe is what I feel when I listen to music, or see a painting that I love, or when I watch Lily kneeling on her prayer cushion before the altar, praying. One is an awe at nature, and the other is awe at the wild irrational beauty of the mind. Are these awes in opposition to one another? Or are they, in some terrifying, spooky way, somehow connected? Clever just shrugged. I believe that all our philosophy—I said to him, on a roll now—all our religions and even our sciences, every human attempt to understand or explain ourselves, the world and our place in it—all our inquisitiveness, our superstition, our fear, our arrogance, all the ways in which we defend ourselves against the awe an animal feels when he stares into a starry black night like this one, the terror felt by an animal smart enough to ask but not enough to answer—has its roots in our understanding of time. We are animals cursed with cognizance of death; we know we will end, and while we do not remember beginning, we know and must believe that we began, and this belief in our own beginning makes us want to find out what happened before we all began, and further it makes us want to know how everything began. What happened in the beginning? Imagine this (I said to Clever): it is night—a clear cool night like this one, a bleak and hard night of a long time ago. The wind ripples the grasses of the rolling plains, predators cackle forebodingly far away (or maybe near). A primitive man, exhausted deep in his bones from the endless labor of daily persistence, pokes listlessly with a stick at the orange embers crumbling in the firepit. Sparks crack, smoke wafts upward, bright spirals of light skittle up from the throbbing ashes. Nearby, a drowsy child looks up at him, his face red in the dim firelight. He is almost asleep, his eyes languid but full of idle curiosity. He points at the rocks and the trees and the fire, and finally at the looming vault of sky above them haunted with ribbons of starsmoke, and asks his father—How did all this come to be? And the primitive father can only scratch his head, clear his throat and say—Well, um, it’s, uh… (ahem)… It’s complicated. Gee, how do I put this…?—and then he proceeds to make something up, and he comes up with some crazy story that quickly spins into a mythos so bizarre and darkly beautiful that in time he’s even managed to convince himself of its truth. And the story begins: In the beginning… In the beginning. In the beginning was… In the beginning was a cosmic egg. In the beginning the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. In the beginning