When I look at history, I am a pessimist. . . but when I look at prehistory, I am an optimist.
Perhaps we become aware of our existence only when we feel on our skin the touch of a place that has no name, that connects us to the earliest time, to all the dead, to prehistory, when the mind first stood apart from the world, still unaware that it was orphaned.
Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea of what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge. Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.
War was. . . the chief or maybe the only source of patriotism, and many a politician, from prehistory up to this morning, unified a discontented citizenry by pointing out a national danger and declaring war on it.
In all ages, far back into prehistory, we find human beings have painted and adorned themselves.
We are nothing: imitations, copies, phantoms: repeaters of what we understand badly, that is, hardly at all: the animated fossils of a prehistory that have lived neither here nor there, consequently anywhere, for we are aboriginal foreigners, transplanted from birth in our respective countries of origin.
