you: suddenly, they find themselves remembering everything that they'd been raised to forget; they become precisely what they always were, yet had been striving their entire lives not to be.
"And as I said, we can be certain of this because it has been woven into every page of history that has ever been written. The dates change, as do the traditions and costumes, but the story has always been the same. The moment there was some kind of pressure, whether a group of people overpopulated an area, or was excessive for far too long and allowed their food stores to become depleted, or another group of their very own species marched across some of the imaginary borders that they created to separate one ideology from another, greed, fear, or arrogance bringing them there with weapons in hand, whenever things became difficult and something shook the very structure of what we are composed of, we have consistently crumbled to the ground into an ugly heap, and masses upon masses of people have suffered and died in unspeakable ways.
"And because we are outside of the system of evolution, things could never improve; even though it would seem reasonable that, as the centuries progressed, humanity might learn from its past mistakes, or at the very least from the banal repetition of them, in reality we never did. Instead, every passing age found new ways to create even more destruction, more suffering, more pain. And this can only be explained by the fact that what we are underneath of our 'not so horrible' shell, the very essence of our being, the foundation that all of the greatest societies have unsteadily balanced upon and have eventually collapsed into, is truthfully and irreversibly hideous." Dana finished, and, closing his eyes first, he turned his head to look back into the garden.
With each sentence that he spoke, I continued to wilt in my chair, until finally, I was sitting with my head bowed, looking like a child who had just been reprimanded. I was beginning to get a feeling as to what Coming of Age was all about. I wasn't there to make my mind up about anything, wasn't going to spend any time discussing things. Someone else had already done the thinking for me, and I was expected to ingest it. That was all.
Before that day, I'd always considered Dana to be a calm man. He was opinionated, yes, but always gentle. Yet suddenly, and just like Harek the day before, he was managing to come across as cold, almost confrontational, lashing out at my every thought as if they'd offended him in the deepest way. It occurred to me that they might be doing this intentionally, hoping to set a precedent of some kind, creating an environment where I'd be forced to choose my words with the greatest of caution. If so, they'd already succeeded. I was afraid to open my mouth.
Yet I had to, because there was something that wasn't making sense. I was sure that I'd come close to directly quoting Harek when I said there was something we could do to right the wrongs of our species. But if Dana was correct, and we were 'truthfully and irreversibly hideous', what kind of solution lay in sight? It obviously wasn't a new government or system; from what he'd said, they all ended in the same way. So what did Harek mean by 'a way to restore what we've ruined', 'a way to mend the damage we've caused'? The truth was, I was already sick of hearing how dead-ended we were - I wanted to hear how we planned to move forward in spite of it. I pressed him further. "Dana, maybe Harek wasn't supposed to tell me, and maybe I can't remember his exact words, but I'm positive he mentioned there was a way for us to fix things. Was I wrong about that?"
He took in a deep breath and eyed the ground in front of his feet, "No. You weren't." After raising a hand to his face and grooming his beard for a few seconds, he continued, "And to be honest with you, that is the sole reason I've been asked to see you this morning: to tell you the story of what happened to the world, and
"And as I said, we can be certain of this because it has been woven into every page of history that has ever been written. The dates change, as do the traditions and costumes, but the story has always been the same. The moment there was some kind of pressure, whether a group of people overpopulated an area, or was excessive for far too long and allowed their food stores to become depleted, or another group of their very own species marched across some of the imaginary borders that they created to separate one ideology from another, greed, fear, or arrogance bringing them there with weapons in hand, whenever things became difficult and something shook the very structure of what we are composed of, we have consistently crumbled to the ground into an ugly heap, and masses upon masses of people have suffered and died in unspeakable ways.
"And because we are outside of the system of evolution, things could never improve; even though it would seem reasonable that, as the centuries progressed, humanity might learn from its past mistakes, or at the very least from the banal repetition of them, in reality we never did. Instead, every passing age found new ways to create even more destruction, more suffering, more pain. And this can only be explained by the fact that what we are underneath of our 'not so horrible' shell, the very essence of our being, the foundation that all of the greatest societies have unsteadily balanced upon and have eventually collapsed into, is truthfully and irreversibly hideous." Dana finished, and, closing his eyes first, he turned his head to look back into the garden.
With each sentence that he spoke, I continued to wilt in my chair, until finally, I was sitting with my head bowed, looking like a child who had just been reprimanded. I was beginning to get a feeling as to what Coming of Age was all about. I wasn't there to make my mind up about anything, wasn't going to spend any time discussing things. Someone else had already done the thinking for me, and I was expected to ingest it. That was all.
Before that day, I'd always considered Dana to be a calm man. He was opinionated, yes, but always gentle. Yet suddenly, and just like Harek the day before, he was managing to come across as cold, almost confrontational, lashing out at my every thought as if they'd offended him in the deepest way. It occurred to me that they might be doing this intentionally, hoping to set a precedent of some kind, creating an environment where I'd be forced to choose my words with the greatest of caution. If so, they'd already succeeded. I was afraid to open my mouth.
Yet I had to, because there was something that wasn't making sense. I was sure that I'd come close to directly quoting Harek when I said there was something we could do to right the wrongs of our species. But if Dana was correct, and we were 'truthfully and irreversibly hideous', what kind of solution lay in sight? It obviously wasn't a new government or system; from what he'd said, they all ended in the same way. So what did Harek mean by 'a way to restore what we've ruined', 'a way to mend the damage we've caused'? The truth was, I was already sick of hearing how dead-ended we were - I wanted to hear how we planned to move forward in spite of it. I pressed him further. "Dana, maybe Harek wasn't supposed to tell me, and maybe I can't remember his exact words, but I'm positive he mentioned there was a way for us to fix things. Was I wrong about that?"
He took in a deep breath and eyed the ground in front of his feet, "No. You weren't." After raising a hand to his face and grooming his beard for a few seconds, he continued, "And to be honest with you, that is the sole reason I've been asked to see you this morning: to tell you the story of what happened to the world, and
Similar Books
