About a hundred thousand years ago, perhaps as many as a hundred and fifty thousand or as little as fifty thousand, the first man was born. In the eyes of his parents he must have been an ugly baby, an outcast from the brood and from the tribe from the moment of his birth. He was lucky to survive, for monstrous births were not generally suffered to live in that time and many more like him would have perished, and would in other times and places perish, by accident or design, and without further consequence. He was different from his tribe: his features to them seemed curiously unnatural: angular, sharp, and distorted. His gracile frame seemed spindly and ill adapted to survive in the rigorous climate, which could vary every few years, alternating between humid–hot and freezing–dry conditions, interspersed with a temperate mediocrity hardly more favorable, since it ill suited the growth of the plants on which the tribes depended. To the society of the race he was a useless individual—an idle jack—spending much time in seemingly depressed, introverted contemplation; staring into space; fiddling with pieces of stone and slate; or making marks in the earth with a stick. Perhaps his social experience was the origin of the story of the Ugly Duckling. The first Outsider, he must have been familiar with loneliness in a time when loneliness was a difficult condition to achieve and an undesirable one.
Let us call him Adam.
Adam sat for long periods between gathering plants or catching animals, when he was not shivering too much to think or too exhausted by the sun’s heat. And in those periods when he was able to reflect, he contemplated the great mystery that was his existence in the world. He could speak in a way—the gift of tongues—that the tribe could not, but he had no one to speak to. He made peculiar guttural and explosive sounds, and he seemed to gesture, in apparent madness, at the beasts and plants and rocks, and even at the sky, as he made these strange noises. This was the birth of language, and he was naming the things around him.
-Richard J. Bird
"The more things change, the more they stay the same." is a line I've read quite often. I think the truth of this statement is reflected in the excerpt above. Many of us here, I'm sure, will be able to empathize with "Adam", because thinking, leave alone independent thinking, is not something that is encouraged, or sometimes even allowed today. In fact, the conventional "System", particularly the education system, seeks to stamp it out of our minds as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. So much for evolution.
-H
