"Life began in the primal 'seas'--which are what we mean by primal soup. There it could live protected from the harmful rays. Not until much later, when life in the oceans had formed an atmosphere, did the first amphibians crawl out onto land. The rest is what we have already talked about. And here we are, sitting in a hut in the woods, looking back on a process that has taken three or four billion years. And in us, this long process has finally become aware of itself."
"And yet you don't think it all happened quite accidentally?"
"I never said that. The picture on this board shows that evolution had a direction. Across the aeons of time animals have evolved with increasingly complicated nerve systems--and an ever bigger brain. Personally, I don't think that can be accidental. What do you think?"
"It can't be pure chance that created the human eye. Don't you think there is meaning in our being able to see the world around us?"
"Funnily enough, the development of the eye puzzled Darwin too. He couldn't really come to terms with the fact that something as delicate and sensitive as an eye could be exclusively due to natural selection."
Sophie sat looking up at Alberto. She was thinking how odd it was that she should be alive now, and that she only lived this one time and would never again return to life. Suddenly she exclaimed:
What matters our creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?
Alberto frowned at her.
"You must not talk like that, child. Those are the words of the Devil."
"The Devil?"
"Or Mephistopheles--in Goethe's Faust 'Was soil uns denn das ew'ge Schaffen! Geschaffenes zu nichts hinweg-zuraffenV "
"But what do those words mean exactly?" "As Faust dies and looks back on his life's work, he says in triumph:
Then to the moment could I say:
Linger you now, you are so fair!
Now records of my earthly dayNo flights of aeons can impair--Foreknowledge comes, and fills me with such bliss,I take my joy, my highest moment this."
"That was very poetic."
"But then it's the Devil's turn. As soon as Faust dies, he exclaims:
A foolish word, bygone.
How so then, gone?
Gone, to sheer Nothing, past with null made one!
What matters creative endless toil,When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?
'It is bygone'--How shall this riddle run?
As good as if things never had begun,Yet circle back, existence to possess:
I'd rather have Eternal Emptiness."
"And is it not also a consequence of Darwin's theory that we are part of something all-encompassing, in which every tiny life form has its significance in the big picture? We are the living planet, Sophie! We are the great vessel sailing around a burning sun in the universe. But each and every one of us is also a ship sailing through life with a cargo of genes. When we have carried this cargo safely to the next harbor--we have not lived in vain. Thomas Hardy expresses the same thought in his poem Transformations':
Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew,
Bosomed here at its foot:
This branch may be his wife,
A ruddy human life
Now turned to a green shoot.
These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.
So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!"