We were naked astronauts, dumb and weird and dying of oxygen, visitors from another world, possessing these poor apes we had stumbled into. Oh god, we thought, what has happened? Where have we come from? Wherever shall we go? What is this place?
We walked uncertain on fresh green grass. We were the first humans. We cried, and our babies cried, and all babies cry until they learn what it is like to be here, because every human is the first human, in a way; you do not inherit their experiences, thus you repeat them; you must start from scratch like every human before you.
Seeing is an incredible thing; the reason it is incredible is that you don’t see that it is; it just happens, and you don’t think about it until later, when you stare at the fire and think weird thoughts. How am I seeing? Is this real? Is this normal? If it is normal, why does it feel so odd? If it isn’t, why does it feel so normal? Is this what home was like?
Where have we come from? Wherever shall we go?
We looked at the sea. Some of us wondered if that was where we were from.
We dove down and choked and gagged and coughed water out of our lungs after struggling back up onto the surface.
Then we did it again, to make sure, because maybe the apes that we had taken over didn’t have their home there, but perhaps— and we made many words to describe that feeling— something else did.
Sight and touch and the sensation of having a body made it natural to assume that whatever we were looking for, in terms of a home, was a place— and places are experienced by bodies— and the mind’s eye, and the mind’s hand, and the mind’s body, which are made of sight and touch and that sensation, made one think of the thing within us— the thing that was not just an ape— was somehow a body too. It was easy to forget; and it wasn’t language’s fault. Language is the best tool we have; it is divine; and if it fails, it is but the failure of mortals to reach divinity.
And so we rejected the sea. We rejected the forests. We rejected the wide grasslands, and the mountains holy and ragged, and the empty deserts which fix men’s minds upon the miraculous, and we rejected the hills, and the pastures, and the rivers.
Those, we said, are not our homes, not truly.
But the stars— those were different.
Perhaps it was because we simply could not reach them.
Is that where have we come from?
Is that where shall we go?
Time passed; this, too, was alien to us; we are half-surprised at our own gray faces, by the changes in our childhood haunts that we return to to once again haunt, if only for an hour.
Time passed, and we saw the stars change sometimes, and realized that the night sky we were staring at was ever so slightly different than the one that our forefathers did.
Time passed, and we stopped looking at the stars, for we had blotted out the stars with our own glorious light. What a feat to be proud of! Mankind need not travel to the stars; we will build them here on earth.
Time passed, and we built better telescopes and became better scientists, and looked at the stars once more to see if, perhaps, we had our home there.
In the end, we weren’t from there, either.
But I wouldn’t worry. In time, we will set our sights on another metaphor that we will then tear down, and then another, until we have verified that we have no home that waits longingly for our return.
Oh god, what are we?
Where have we come from?
Wherever shall we go?
Even now, things are unfamiliar, although we have managed to convince ourselves that they are not. The body soothes itself with greenery and birdsong. The mind soothes itself with stories and music.
Sometimes I think that the true home of humanity is full of right angles and sponge cake.
I think that stories exist there; they really exist, that is. On earth, the screeches of black cats in the night do not foreshadow death; painted eyes on a brick wall or billboard do not mean anyone is watching; the whisper in the crowd that you happen to hear has no secret meaning; and there is no love story.
It is an alien way of understanding the world that we have brought with us; it has no use in a place such as earth.
Every sponge cake that we bake is a precious alien artifact, a light and airy construction brought into this world by ways made more mysterious through their adherence to natural laws.
Consider a madeleine, the pastry, the sponge cake, with careful whirls and ridges which follow some pattern imprinted upon it for no discernible reason.
Someone might ask what the madeleine is for.
To eat, you might say.
Then why does it have those ridges?
And you look at it anew, and see that it is a seashell from some alien sea creature, or perhaps an imprint of said creature, a fossil made of sponge cake in the way that dinosaur bones are made of stone. Or maybe it is but the fingerprint left by lady fingers clawing their way into reality.
There is an ideal sponge cake, I think, in our homeland of music and right angles and stories, and we idly trace out the patterns of it in imperfect recipes and cake molds, like we trace out stories in imperfect books.
We brought those things from our old home, the stars.
One day we shall return bearing books and sponge cakes.