“Isn’t this what a dog does with a scent?”
“No, not at all. Sitting here, you and I are releasing a physical emanation of ourselves into the air. This scent, this physical emanation, extends all the way back to the car, and a dog encountering it there could easily follow it here, but it wouldn’t be reading the past, it would be reading the present. It would be following its nose to us just the way you might follow your ears to an outdoor concert blocks away.”
“Yes, I see the distinction.”
“To return to the traces on this patch of ground before us: In order to make sense of them, you not only have to recognize that they’re traces of past events, you have to recognize that they have a direction in time: beginning, middle, and end. The beetle’s story begins here, progresses to here, and ends there, where it intersects the mouse’s story. We can see that the mouse’s story continues—into a future that we can make predictions about. Sometime last night, a mouse was here, and now it’s gone—headed that away. If we follow those tracks, we know we’re eventually going to find something standing in those tracks—and that something is going to be what?”
“A mouse.”
“A mouse, Jared, that we have never laid our eyes on until that moment! You see what I’m saying? Sitting right here, we’ve gained the
capacity to foretell the future. We’ve become seers! A few minutes ago I tried to make it plain that becoming hunters didn’t endow us with an irresistible urge to slaughter wildlife, but it does give us some other urges that do seem irresistible. For example, we do seem to be irresistibly attracted to stories, everywhere and everywhen.”
“Yes.”
“Here’s another urge that came to us through hunting: the urge to know what we’re going to encounter on that track ahead of us. Each and every one of us wants to know the future—by any means whatever, rational or irrational, sensible or fantastic. This is so deeply ingrained in us, so much taken for granted, that we don’t give a moment’s thought to how remarkable it is. For many of us, every smallest action gives us purchase on the future. On getting up, we dress a certain way in anticipation of meeting a certain person. We read the paper not so much to find out what has happened as to find out what’s likely to happen—in world affairs, in politics, in business, in sports, and so on. We check the weather forecast to see if we’ll need an umbrella. On our way to work, we review our plans for the day, which will undoubtedly involve making plans for tomorrow, for next week, maybe even for next year. A good day is likely to be viewed as a day that turns out as planned, that has no unpleasant surprises. At some point we make plans about how we’ll spend the evening. We’ll undoubtedly spend time thinking about things that need to be done in anticipation of future events. We’ll order plane tickets, make hotel reservations, arrange for someone to receive a gift on a birthday days or weeks hence.
“It would be hard for us even to imagine an intelligent species that wasn’t obsessed with the future—and perhaps a species that wasn’t obsessed with the future could never seem fully intelligent to us at all. Beyond all the presumably rational planning I just described, every single one of us is a reader of omens and signs—no matter how much we pooh-pooh it. When we get up in the morning and the newspaper on the lawn is soaked and the milk in our cereal is sour and the shirt we intended to wear is in the laundry and the car won’t start, there’s not one of us who can avoid thinking, ‘This is going to be a rotten day.’ There’s not one of us who can pick a winner at the track without thinking, ‘I knew it!’ There’s not one of us who can get a call from someone we’ve just been thinking about without feeling a twinge of pride in our clairvoyant abilities. I have utterly no rational belief in astrology, but if someone reads me my horoscope, a tiny part of me always listens and says, ‘Yes, yes, that could happen, that makes sense.’
“You and I might insist that we have no belief in anyone’s ability to predict the future, but others are not so snooty and will give ready credence to their psychic reader, their tarot reader, their palm reader, their aura reader, their I Ching reader, their dream reader. And this is something that cuts across all cultural lines. Belief in divination is found in every human culture, everywhere in the world. This isn’t to say that everyone who looks into the future is practicing magic. Astronomy developed as a means of predicting celestial events. All medical drug research is designed to determine future effects, so that a doctor can say, ‘Take this pill three times a day, and in two weeks you’ll be better.’ Doctors in all cultures are associated with divination, including our own, and we expect them to be trained readers of predictive signs. It doesn’t matter whether we’re in a Stone-Age village or an atomic-age medical facility, we expect them to say, ‘We’ll follow this procedure today, then tomorrow you’ll be better.’ The scientific method is itself fundamentally based on making predictions. ‘Theory predicts that doing A, B, and C will result in D. I’ll test the theory in this way and see whether this prediction is accurate or not.’
“Because we were born as hunters, we have a genetic craving to know where the track leads and what lies at the end of it. We have an appetite for the future that is as persistent as our appetite for food or sex. To say that it’s genetic is of course to propose a theory, but again I see nothing implausible in it. The hunter who’s not only hungry but avid to know the future is certainly going to have an edge over the hunter who’s just hungry.”
“Yes, I’d have to think so.”
When the god is with you
“Tell me, Jared, are you a gambler?”
“No, not particularly.”
“ ‘Not particularly.’ What does that mean?”
“I guess it means I’m a gambler in a normal, casual way. I’ll spend an evening with friends playing penny-ante poker, or if someone wants to go to the track, I’ll bet a few dollars just to make it interesting. But I’m not one of those guys who isn’t alive if he doesn’t have a bet down on something.”
“You sound like you know a guy like that—a compulsive gambler.”
“Yeah, actually I do—my older brother.”
“Tell me about him. What’s his name?”
“This is Harlan. Harlan’s very strange to me, an enigma, a being from another planet.”
Go on.
I sighed and mentally kicked myself for not having answered her original question so as to avoid this line of questioning. “Harlan’s just the way I described—not alive if he doesn’t have a bet down. His reason for getting up in the morning is to check the scores, to find out how he did during the night. He’ll bet on anything, anywhere. He knows everything. If there’s a football game going on in Melbourne, he can tell you who the players are, who the coaches are, what their records have been for the past five years. But he doesn’t love the sports—or the teams. He’s just interested in the point spread and the odds—and, of course, in winning.”
“Does he lose a lot?”
“No, oddly enough, he doesn’t. I know a lot of gamblers brag about their winnings and lie about their losses, but Harlan’s honest. And if he didn’t win consistently, or at least break even, he would’ve gone broke long ago, the way he bets. He thinks nothing of dropping ten thousand dollars on a game. If he doesn’t have that kind of money at risk, he’s not interested.”
“It has to hurt if he loses.”
“Absolutely. He lives and dies fifty times every day.”
Shirin smiled. “And you really don’t understand what he sees in that?”
“Well … it’s one thing to hear about it and another thing to be around it. He was married once—I think it lasted three weeks. He doesn’t have friends, he has bookies.”