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By Root 1393 0

the world that our ancestors made if we cannot understand the motives and processes of its making? It seems to me that if the pessimists were right about the impossibility of our being able to understand the existential predicament of our ancestors, then they would have to be just as dubious about our ability to understand one another. We have to learn to be human, and the first generation who laid legitimate claim to the title of the New Human Race still had to learn from their mortal predecessors. Today’s children are raised to adulthood by their own kind, but emortals of my antiquity were raised—almost without exception—by foster parents who knew that their own useful hopes had been dashed and that only individuals equipped with the best possible Zaman transformations could have any realistic hope of living for more than two hundred and fifty years, or of sustaining their continuity of self indefinitely.

Like every other individual in history, we pioneers of true New Humanity first learned to see ourselves as others saw us, and no matter what we have learned since then, we carry that legacy within us. While we still have that gift, we still have the ability to see those others as they saw themselves. However New we may be, we are still the Human Race, and if we are properly to understand ourselves we must set ourselves to understand those who came before us.

Like history, autobiography is a kind of fantasy, but each and every one of us is permanently involved in constructing the story of his or her own life, and even those of us who are perfectly content to act without recording remain creatures of fantasy. Those of us who record as well as acting are attempting to grasp the substance of our personal fantasies and to be as precise as possible in their construction as well as their interpretation.

For those reasons, therefore, The Prehistory of Death carried an elaborate commentary that did not even try hard to be dispassionate. So far as I was concerned, in fact, the commentary was—and is—the book. The elaborate hypertextual links forging Labyrinthine pathways through the vast mass of accumulated data were, in my estimation, mere footnotes.

To anyone who still labors under the delusion that such an assertion is heresy against the scientific method I can only say: “I cannot help it. That is what I feel. That is the foundation on which my life and work have been based.”

TWENTY-TWO

The commentary attached to The Prehistory of Death summarized everything that was known about early hominid lifestyles and developed an elaborate argument about the effects of natural selection on the patterns of mortality in humankind’s ancestor species. It gave special attention to the evolution of parental care as a genetic strategy.

Earlier species of man, I observed, had raised parental care to a level of efficiency that permitted the human infant to be born at a much earlier stage in its development than any other, maximizing its opportunity to be shaped by nurture and learning. From the very beginning, I proposed, protohuman species were actively at war with death. The evolutionary success of genus Homo was based in the collaborative activities of parents in protecting, cherishing, and preserving the lives of children: activities that extended beyond immediate family groups as reciprocal altruism made it advantageous for humans to form tribes rather than mere families.

In these circumstances, I argued, it was entirely natural that the remotest origins of consciousness and culture should be intimately bound up with a keen awareness of the war against death. I asserted that the first great task of the human imagination was to carry forward that war.

It was entirely understandable, I said, that early paleontologists, having discovered the mutilated bones of Neanderthal humans in apparent graves, with the remains of primitive garlands of flowers, should instantly have felt an intimate kinship with them; there could be no more persuasive evidence of full humanity than the attachment of ceremony to the idea and the fact of death.