One in a Million
Created | Updated Mar 18, 2004
Look over your shoulder.
Those familiar and smiling people are your mother and father.
They brought you here. To this point, in space and time.
They belong to a different world. They stand in one place to use a telephone. They instinctively delineate work and play. They earn money before they spend it.
That's why they worry about you a little.
And standing behind your parents you notice four more figures, almost as brightly lit. They are your grandparents, but somehow younger than you remember them.
There is no plastic in their shoes, nor in their wallets, only a surfeit of it where their teeth should be. Their watches are wound by hand. They listen with reverence to the radio. The public library is for them a hallowed place.
And there are more behind them, faces you do not recognise. You realise suddenly that you are at the apex of a phalanx of humanity, stretching away into mist and shadow.
Look hard. Gaze back there, as far as you can. The rank of eight are your great-grandparents. Their clothes are buttoned, and there are no car-keys in the pockets. They smell of carbolic and believe what they read in the newspapers. They vote for people they have never heard of. The foundations of their community are pulpit and schoolroom. They travel abroad for war, instead of holidays.
And every generation mystifies its predecessor. Every new rank delves and devours new repositories of knowledge, and covets new material possibilities.
Some of the next sixteen are tentative readers. Schooling is a fleeting season of their lives, but they compensate with a boundless appetite for toil and service. They assimilate skills with the instinct of primitives; anything short of surgery they will do for themselves.
The thirty-two are becoming a mixed bunch. Some of your great-great-great-grandparents would deem some others subhuman. Some of them live in stinking damp hovels, castigated and vilified. Some of them are dying all their lives.
And yet none of them can die, at least not before they spawn progeny. If a single one of them perishes childless, you will vanish in an instant.
Soon the ranks are becoming ragged. Some ancestors appear more than once, in more than one generation even. Races and creeds are mixed; incest vies with their other crimes. Your forebears brand you a mongrel. There is nothing pure in your lineage. Be careful of your prejudices. Every minority that you despise is there somewhere in your own past.
And yet there is nobility too, nobility of a true kind. We do not speak of arbitrary aristocracies here. Your forefathers are fashioning a world beyond your comprehension. They are building cities. They overthrow great armies. They are claiming huge tracts of a virgin planet. Their travails reduce you to shameful insignificance.
Your family, grown too large and ancient to comprehend, back before steam, before iron, before even fire. Back until humanity dissolves, until wombs are no more, until form itself is void. Your seed is there still, alive in a darkness waiting on the coming of time.
Sweep back to the present. Dare to look forward now, into the yawning chasm at your feet. Time to come does not exist, and yet fresh footholds condense out of nothing with the very next blink of your eye.
You are the spearhead of the cosmos. Countless millions strove to make your every heartbeat possible.
So inconsequential and so mighty, you are the ultimate paradox. Trivial compared with what has gone before, and yet unique in your mastery of the moment.
All those others have become mere history. You alone cannot help but make it.
