“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 day
No 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.”
“That’s pessimistic. I liked the first passage best. Even though his life
was over, Faust saw some meaning in the traces he would leave behind him.”
“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.