There, a man stepped out onto the balcony in a bright beam of millennial sunlight, holding the original universe in his hands, in a Tupperware container, and for one flickering moment he saw into the future. Built the strip mall.Īnd in the end, after billions of years of evolution, a pink two-story motel rose up on a drag of asphalt in Berkeley, California. Cooked meat and slathered it with special sauce. We made bewitching sonatas and novels and paintings. We named ourselves Homer, Sappho, Humperdinck, and Nixon. Full of wonder, we attached words to the sky and the mountains and the water, and claimed them as our own. Under the hot sun, we roasted different colors, fornicated, and fought. There were pea-brained brontosauri and fiery meteor showers and gnawing, hairy-backed monsters that kept coming and coming - these furious little stumps, human beings, us. Oceans formed, a wormy thing crawled from the sea. Our world - Earth - was covered with lava, then granite mountains. Cooked heavy elements - silicon, magnesium, and nickel - were sucked into a small pocket and balled together under great pressure and morphed with the organic matter of our solar system. Out flew dust particles like millions of fast-moving birds into the expanding aviary of the cosmos. Out poured photons and quarks and leptons. All of the universe was the size of this brain, floating in space.
