Humans

Matt Haig

Description

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME. OR IS THERE? After an 'incident' one wet Friday night where Professor Andrew Martin is found walking naked through the streets of Cambridge, he is not feeling quite himself. Food sickens him. Clothes confound him. Even his loving wife and teenage son are repulsive to him. He feels lost amongst a crazy alien species and hates everyone on the planet. Everyone, that is, except Newton, and he's a dog. What could possibly make someone change their mind about the human race. . . ?

Sujets

• Unidentified flying object
• Science fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 09 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780857868770
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Matt Haig is the number one bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive and six highly acclaimed novels for adults, including How to Stop Time and The Radleys . As a writer for children and young adults he has won the Blue Peter Book Award, the Smarties Book Prize and been nominated three times for the Carnegie Medal. His work has been published in over forty languages. @matthaig1 matthaig.com

Published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Matt Haig, 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Quotation taken from interview with J. G. Ballard, © 2003, J. G. Ballard, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Ltd.
Lyrics from ‘This Must Be The Place’ by David Byrne courtesy Index Music Inc.
Extract from ‘That it will never come again’ by Emily Dickinson reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson , Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Michael Franti quotation reproduced by kind permission of Guerilla Management Collective.
Extract from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace reproduced by kind permission of the Hill Nadell Literary Agency.
Extract from The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (Random House) reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates.
Extract from Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 2004 Marcus du Sautoy.
Extract from Contact by Carl Sagan copyright © 1985 Druyan-Sagan Associates, Inc. formerly known as Carl Sagan Productions, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Druyan-Sagan Associates, Inc. This material cannot be further circulated without written permission of Druyan-Sagan Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 466 3
eISBN 978 0 85786 877 0
Typeset in Minion by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire
To Andrea, Lucas and Pearl
I have just got a new theory of eternity.
– Albert Einstein
Contents
Preface
(An illogical hope in the face of overwhelming adversity)
PART I
I took my power in my hand
The man I was not
Detached nouns and other early trials for the language-learner
Texaco
Corpus Christi
Human clothes
Questions
Coffee
Mad people
The cubic root of 912,673
Dead cows
The world as will and representation
Amnesia
4 Campion Row
The war and money show
A stranger
Starting the sequence
Primes
A moment of sheer terror
The distribution of prime numbers
Glory
Dark matter
Emily Dickinson
Dishwasher
A large house
Daniel Russell
The pain
Egypt
Where we are from
The dog and the music
Grigori Perelman
Crunchy wholenut peanut butter
Isobel’s dance
The mother
PART II
I held a jewel in my fingers
Sleepwalking
I was a wasn’t
Wider than the sky
A few seconds of silence over breakfast
Life/death/football
Light-bulb
Shopping
The Zeta Function
The problem with equations
The violet
The possibility of pain
Sloping roofs (and other ways to deal with the rain)
The thing with feathers
Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens
In-between
Two weeks in the Dordogne and a box of dominoes
Social networking
Forever is composed of nows
Violence
The taste of her skin
The rhythm of life
Teenagers
Australian wine
The watcher
How to see for ever
The intruder
Perfect time
A king of infinite space
The art of letting go
Neuroadaptive activity
Platykurtic distribution
The Hat and Feathers
The ideal castle
Somewhere else
Places beyond logic
PART III
The wounded deer leaps the highest
An encounter with Winston Churchill
The replacement
A game
90.2 MHz
The ultimate crime
The nature of reality
A face as shocked as the moon
The second type of gravity
Advice for a human
A very brief hug
The melancholy beauty of the setting sun
When galaxies collide
Home
A note, and some acknowledgements
Preface
(An illogical hope in the face of overwhelming adversity)
I know that some of you reading this are convinced humans are a myth, but I am here to state that they do actually exist. For those that don’t know, a human is a real bipedal lifeform of mid-range intelligence, living a largely deluded existence on a small water-logged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe.
For the rest of you, and those who sent me, humans are in many respects exactly as strange as you would expect them to be. Certainly it is true that on a first sighting you would be appalled by their physical appearance.
Their faces alone contain all manner of hideous curiosities. A protuberant central nose, thin-skinned lips, primitive external auditory organs known as ‘ears’, tiny eyes and unfathomably pointless eye brows . All of which take a long time to mentally absorb and accept.
The manners and social customs too are a baffling enigma at first. Their conversation topics are very rarely the things they want to be talking about, and I could write ninety-seven books on body shame and clothing etiquette before you would get even close to understanding them.
Oh, and let’s not forget The Things They Do To Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This is an infinite list. It includes – shopping, watching TV, taking the better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semi-autobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old, and harbouring a vague desire to believe there might be a meaning to it all.
Yes, it is all very amusing, in a painful kind of way. But I have discovered human poetry while on Earth. One of these poets, the very best one (her name was Emily Dickinson), said this: ‘I dwell in possibility.’ So let us humour ourselves and do the same. Let us open our minds entirely, for what you are about to read will need every prejudice you may have to stand aside in the name of understanding.
And let us consider this: what if there actually is a meaning to human life? And what if – humour me – life on Earth is something not just to fear and ridicule but also cherish? What then?
Some of you may know what I have done by now, but none of you know the reason. This document, this guide, this account – call it what you will – will make everything clear. I plead with you to read this book with an open mind, and to work out for yourself the true value of human life.
Let there be peace.
PART I
I took my power in my hand
The man I was not
So, what is this?
You ready?
Okay. Inhale. I will tell you.
This book, this actual book, is set right here , on Earth. It is about the meaning of life and nothing at all. It is about what it takes to kill somebody, and save them. It is about love and dead poets and wholenut peanut butter. It’s about matter and antimatter, everything and nothing, hope and hate. It’s about a forty-one-year-old female historian called Isobel and her fifteen-year-old son called Gulliver and the cleverest mathematician in the world. It is, in short, about how to become a human.
But let me state the obvious. I was not one. That first night, in the cold and the dark and the wind, I was nowhere near. Before I read Cosmopolitan , in the garage, I had never even seen this written language. I realise that this could be your first time too. To give you an idea of the way people here consume stories, I have put this book together as a human would. The words I use are human words, typed in a human font, laid out consecutively in the human style. With your almost instantaneous ability to translate even the most exotic and primitive linguistic forms, I trust comprehension should not be a problem.
Now, to reiterate, I was not Professor Andrew Martin. I was like you.
Professor Andrew Martin was merely a role. A disguise. Someone I needed to be in order to complete a task. A task that had begun with his abduction, and death. (I am conscious this is setting a grim tone, so I will resolve not to mention death again for at least the rest of this page.)
The point is that I was not a forty-three-year-old mathematician – husband, father – who taught at Cambridge University and who had devoted the last eight years of his life to solving a mathematical problem that had so far proved unsolvable.
Prior to arriving on Earth I did not have mid-brown hair that fell in a natural side-parting. Equally, I did not have an opinion on The Planets by Holtz or Talking Heads’ second album, as I did not agree with the concept of music. Or I shouldn’t have, anyway. And how could I believe that Australian wine was automatically inferior to wine sourced from other regions on the planet when I had never drunk anything but liquid nitrogen?
Belonging as I did to a post-marital species, it goes without saying that I hadn’t been a neglectful husband with an eye for one of my students any more than I had been a man who walked his English Springer Spaniel – a category of hairy domestic deity otherwise known as a ‘dog’ – as an excuse to leave the house. Nor had I written books on mathematics, or insisted that my publishers use an author photograph that was now nearing its fifteenth anniversary.
No, I wasn’t that man.
I had no feeling for that man whatsoever. And yet he had been real, as real as you and I, a real mammalian life form, a diploid, eukaryotic primate who, five minutes before midnight, had been sitting at his desk, staring at his computer screen and drinking black coffee (don’t worry, I shall explain coffee and my misadventures with it a little later). A life form who may or may not have jumped out of his chair as the breakthrough came, as his mind arrived at a plac