And now this: there is a jellyfish in the Mediterranean, called Turritopsis dohrnii, that is as immortal as Tolkien’s elves. It can be killed, but if it manages to keep a low profile, it can live for ever, by regularly reverting to an earlier stage of development, literally rejuvenating itself. The jellyfish you killed last summer in Puglia could have been swimming with Cleopatra.
And now this: peregrine falcons, which can dive faster than a Ferrari 488, have left their wild lairs and come to squat in London. They nest on roofs and niches high above the streets and find prey in abundance. Londoners rarely get to see them only because Londoners rarely bother to look up. They are too busy looking at their mobile phones.
And now this: when you look at the stars, you are looking at the past. Starlight takes many, many years to reach our planet, and when you lay your eyes on a star burning seventy-four light years away from us, you are looking at the star as it was when you were born, if you are seventy-four. Meanwhile it might have ceased to exist, or it might have turned into cheese, and even with the most advanced telescope, you couldn’t possibly know. Moreover, each star is set at a different distance from our planet, so the light of each star comes from a different time. The night sky is a patchwork of ages woven in light.
And think about this, too: the matter that makes your legs, your head, your chest, was created in the Big Bang, at the beginning of the universe. After you die, it will go on to make other things – animals, planets, stars, tentacled aliens. For a pitifully brief time, that matter came together in a very specific way to generate a conscious being, you, a being that would allow that matter to think. Before you were born and after you die, the matter just went on being and it will go on and on, like Lego bricks that sometimes take the shape of a house, sometimes of a car. How come that when those bricks took the form of you, they suddenly could think, and in such a sophisticated way that they were capable of creating, well, actual Lego bricks? No one knows.
Our universe is weird. A human lifespan is not enough to make it seem less weird, even marginally so. For that matter, the amassed knowledge of the puny 200,000 years our species has been here is not enough to make it seem less weird, even marginally so. If anything, the more we learn, the weirder the universe seems. Respectable physicists argue that parallel universes might exist;5 respectable neuroscientists argue that you don’t feel an emotion as a reaction to an event, but as a prediction based on past experiences and cultural expectations.6
The problem remains, the universe might be forever strange, but we still get disenchanted as we grow older. If that is not because we inevitably run out of new experiences to reignite our sense of wonder, then why is it?
This is the question I asked myself in the cold, rainy winter weeks I spent shuttling between my study and the library, surrounding myself with books and articles on the history of science, the philosophy of science and the lives of scientists – and chatting with my scientifically inclined friends and acquaintances.
The peregrine falcons of London brought me a possible answer.
*
I learned about the falcons from an article in the Guardian, which I read on the Tube. I couldn’t stop thinking about it as I walked from Piccadilly Circus Tube station to the library. The article is by an urban birdwatcher,7 David Lindo, whose motto is ‘Look up’. His words resonated with me. In a novel I wrote more than ten years ago, Pan,8 I made the same point: we city-dwellers should look up more. Lindo says that, by not looking up, we are missing a lot: including the fact that peregrine falcons have arrived on London’s rooftops. There are wonders above our heads we could enjoy if only we bothered to use our necks a little more.
I read the article, I felt validated, understood, and nodded vigorously. I got to the library, left my umbrella and my coat in the cloakroom, and set to work, internally smirking at those lesser mortals, corporate drones and suchlike, who never look up.
As I sat down in the hushed atmosphere of a panelled room, I realized that, while I was thinking about an article on the importance of looking up – an article I was going to quote in the book I was researching – I had, in fact, never actually looked up. My attention had been divided between juggling the umbrella and a bag full of books, and trying not to get run over by cars and tourists. I hadn’t thought of checking the sky for peregrines. I was a lesser mortal myself.
I had excellent reasons for not looking up: I had a lot of work to do and not enough time to do it. Nonetheless, I felt like a bad person and the worst kind of writer – one who doesn’t put his money where his mouth is. A liar, in fact.
Then I realized that in my predicament was the answer I had been looking for.
The older we get, the more relentlessly we focus on what we must do, and the trade-off is that we cannot focus much on what we would like to do. As an infant, I was looked after: there were no duties to perform – I could enjoy (for the one and only time in my life) the luxury of unlimited free time and a quiet mind-space. Then, slowly, social interactions started and I had to make friends. And, on top of that, there was homework to be done. In a while, I needed to muster the courage to ask girls out. Then came essays, then bills to pay, then a career, then health checks, responsibilities stacking one on top of the other. The tower of things we have to do grows taller by the day, but the day’s length remains the same.
To make our lives manageable, we find shortcuts. We focus on the things we know how to do, the paths already mapped, so that we don’t have to map a new path every time. It makes sense. When you must regularly get to the other side of a mountain, it is more convenient to dig a tunnel once than to climb up and down every time. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as you never forget that by going through the tunnel you won’t get to meet deer and pick blackberries and stumble upon sweet secret glades.
But you take the tunnel day in day out, and you do forget. You forget that you could climb the mountain any time you wanted to. You forget that taking the tunnel is a strategy, not a necessity; a habit, not a destiny.
*
Peregrine falcons soar above children and adults alike, but only children look up. Growing up is a process of making and wearing our own blinkers. A spectacularly strange world unfolds around us; we train ourselves not to see it, so that we can continue blithely on our way. It is not that we run out of new things to see, it is that we stop seeking them out.
We deserve compassion for that. Probably some New Age guru would say that you must rip off your blinkers, now!, and let your soul joyously fly with the falcons. This makes for a good sound bite – but it is terrible advice. Humans get used to things: this is one of our most significant traits. We put on our blinkers and carry on in the face of illness, carnage, stress, loss of limbs and loved ones. The cars that could run me over in Piccadilly were real enough and so were my deadlines, and for the time being I needed to be blind to the falcons so that I could see the cars and the deadlines. Ripping our blinkers off would leave us defenceless, like children, who are free and safe only insofar as adults take care of them.
The trouble begins when we stop seeing the blinkers as blinkers, clever survival devices that we can take on and off, and start seeing them as ‘the way it is’. In other words, when we start believing too much in what we think we know. It does not matter what kind of blinkers we have, it does not matter whether we believe in gnomèd mines or in a purely mechanical universe. Every world view, every belief, every ‘reality tunnel’, to borrow an expression from the cult novelist and self-styled ‘agnostic mystic’ Robert Anton Wilson, becomes disenchanting when you convince yourself that is all there is. Even ghosts get boring when ghosts are all you think about.