“Land?” the other asked. “What is land?”
“Oh, you know,” he said, waving toward the shore, “the expanse of dirt and rocks that begins over there.”
The creature turned a deeper shade of lavender and said, “I can’t imagine what you’re gibbering about. The dirt and rocks over there are simply the lip of the vast bowl that holds the sea.”
“Oh yes,” the anthropologist said, “I see what you mean. Quite. Go on.”
“Very well,” the other said. “For many millions of centuries the life of the world was merely microorganisms floating helplessly in a chemical broth. But little by little, more complex forms appeared: single-celled creatures, slimes, algae, polyps, and so on.
“But finally,” the creature said, turning quite pink with pride as he came to the climax of his story, “but finally jellyfish appeared!”
4
Nothing much came out of me for ninety seconds or so, except maybe waves of baffled fury. Then I said, “That’s not fair.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t exactly know what I mean. You’ve made some sort of point, but I don’t know what it is.”
“You don’t?”
“No, I don’t.”
“What did the jellyfish mean when it said, ‘But finally jellyfish appeared’?”
“It meant … that is what it was all leading up to. This is what the whole ten or fifteen billion years of creation were leading up to:
jellyfish.”
“I agree. And why doesn’t your account of creation end with the appearance of jellyfish?”
I suppose I tittered. “Because there was more to come beyond jellyfish.”
“That’s right. Creation didn’t end with jellyfish. Still to come were the vertebrates and the amphibians and the reptiles and the mammals, and of course, finally, man.”
“Right.”
“And so your account of creation ends, ‘And finally man appeared.’” “Yes.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that there was no more to come. Meaning that creation had come to an end.”
“This is what it was all leading up to.”
“Yes.”
“Of course. Everyone in your culture knows this. The pinnacle was reached in man. Man is the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation.”
“Yes.”
“When man finally appeared, creation came to an end, because its objective had been reached. There was nothing left to create.”
“That seems to be the unspoken assumption.”
“It’s certainly not always unspoken. The religions of your culture aren’t reticent about it. Man is the end product of creation. Man is the creature for whom all the rest was made: this world, this solar system, this galaxy, the universe itself.”
“True.”