The Story of B

by Daniel Quinn

  “There will be people who will take what I’m saying and make out of it an endorsement of sport hunting. Again, nothing could be further from my mind. The fact that humans evolved as hunters didn’t implant in them an irresistible urge to slaughter wildlife. The successful hunter isn’t the one with the most bloodlust. Bloodlust is not required—is irrelevant. Watch hunters in the wild and you’ll see this. They don’t go about their business frothing at the mouth, and they don’t kill gratuitously.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “and again I hope this won’t sound inquisitorial. It seems to me I’ve read about archaeological finds of vast kills of bison that apparently were mostly left to rot by human hunters. They killed them, picked out the parts they wanted, and abandoned the rest.”

  “Improbable as it seems on the basis of the facts you’ve just mentioned, these were not gratuitous or wasteful slaughters. Hunters in the Old West—I mean hunters of our own culture—could have explained it. They knew from experience that you could literally starve to death surrounded by bison, if these were lean animals such as you’d find late in the winter. In the absence of other food, the only way to survive in the midst of lean bison is to kill vast numbers of them and take what little fat there is. I’m not going to get into the biochemistry of it here, but if you like I can lend you a book on it.”

  I told her I’d take her word for it.

  “Where was I …? I was making the point that hunting isn’t violence. Let me put it this way. The trait that was being saved as we evolved as human hunters was not murderousness, it was a talent for observation, deduction, forecasting, cunning, stealth, and alertness. These are the qualities that make for success as a hunter—and they’re not at all specific to hunting. If they were, then we would indeed be irresistibly impelled to hunt. But there are things that we’re irresistibly impelled to do … and you can see them here.”

  She patted the ground in front of her.

  The “storytelling gene”

  “Tell me what happened here in this spot a few hours ago, Jared.”

  “Well, a beetle came walking along, then a mouse leaped out of the grass at the left and made a grab at the beetle. You said these marks looked like marks of a scuffle, but I don’t know why a mouse would have to scuffle with a beetle.”

  “Maybe the beetle grabbed back.”

  “True … Anyway, after the scuffle, the mouse carried the beetle off to the right.”

  “You understand that this—what you’ve just done—is totally beyond the capacity of any other animal on this planet.”

  “Yes.”

  “What exactly did you do?”

  “Well … actually, I didn’t do anything. You did it.”

  “That’s odd. I could have sworn I saw your lips move.”

  “Yeah, but … What exactly is your question?”

  “I asked what you did.”

  “You said, ‘Tell me what happened here,’ and I told you what happened. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right. What I’m trying to make you see is that the two of us did different things. I did one thing, and you did another. I want you to put a name to what you did.”

  All I could think of to say was that I talked—and I wasn’t going to say that.

  “The reason you can’t name it, Jared, is that you undervalue it. Do you know who Koko is?”

  “Koko? She’s a gorilla that’s been taught sign language, isn’t she?”

  “That’s right. If you sat Koko down here, and a beetle started ambling through the dust, and a mouse came out of the grass and carried it off, Koko would be able to sign something like, ‘Bug bug mouse bug run fight mouse run bug.’ If, ten minutes later, you were able to convey to her your desire for a description of what she’d seen (which is pretty unlikely), the best you could expect would be something like this: ‘Koko mouse see mouse bug Koko see.’ Even that would be remarkable. But what Koko will never be able to do is what you did, which is …?”

  “To put it all together into a story.”

  “Exactly.” B patted the ground in front of her. “This is where storytelling began, Jared. This is where people began to read the world as a collection of stories. There isn’t a child anywhere in the world, in any culture of the world, that doesn’t want to hear a story—and everywhere in the world, in every culture of the world, a story is a story is a story: beginning, middle, and end. Beginning: ‘One night a mouse was traveling through the tall grass on its way home when it suddenly spotted a great black beetle lumbering across a clearing just ahead. “Well,” thought the mouse, “beetles aren’t exactly my favorite food, but protein is protein!”’ Middle: ‘So the mouse hid in the grass until the beetle was just a leap and a bound away, then it rushed out and attacked. To the mouse’s surprise, however, the beetle had a powerful set of jaws of its own, which closed around the mouse’s nose. Back and forth the two of them fought until at last the mouse managed to dislodge the beetle.’ End: ‘ “I’ve got you now,” the mouse said, using its sore nose to flip the beetle onto its back. Carefully avoiding the beetle’s waving legs and snapping jaws, the mouse gobbled up the beetle and happily trotted off toward home.’”

  “Very nice, but … Do you really think we have a storytelling gene:”

  “Well … a geneticist would wince at such an expression. There is no single gene in there you can pop out and label ‘storytelling.’ The theory I’m putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunters who weren’t—and this success translated directly into reproductive success. In other words, hunters who were storytellers tended to be better represented in the gene pool than hunters who weren’t, which (incidentally) accounts for the fact that storytelling isn’t just found here and there among human cultures, it’s found universally.”

  Reading the future

  “The people of the Great Forgetting are quite content to imagine that the human story began just a few thousand years ago when people started building cities, but here is where we became human in the first place. I’m not talking about how we came to walk on two legs or how we came to lose our hair. We were two-legged and hairless for hundreds of thousands of years before we crossed this border.”

  Again she patted the ground in front of us.

  “This is where the temporal structure of the universe began to be imprinted on the human brain. These tracks in front of us are of course with us in the present, but they won’t make any sense until we recognize them as traces of past events. They would be meaningless to any other species, because no other species would be able to read them as traces of the past.”

  “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.”

  “What does he do for a living—or is he a professional gambler?”

  “No, he’s a real-estate agent, a specialist in commercial property. He spends his days on the cell phone with clients and bookies and his nights in front of the television switching channels between the games he’s down on. If they decided to have a sports-free month, I think he’d have to be hospitalized.”

  “Doesn’t he do any casino gambling?”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot that. Casino gambling is for holidays. He spends his vacations in Las Vegas or Atlantic City. They’d have td close the casinos for a month too.”

  “That wouldn’t matter. He’d find something else to bet on. He’d match coins in bars. He’d shoot craps on street corners. He’d bet on the weather, on the elections, on the make of the next car turning the corner, on the number of passengers getting off the next elevator.”

  “You’re right, of course.”

  “You really don’t see that the two of you are brothers in more than a biological sense?”

  “No. What sense do you see it in?”

  “What’s at the root of your brother’s obsession? You say he lives and dies fifty times a day. What does he live and die fifty times a day to find oufi.”

  “He lives and dies fifty times a day to find out if he’s right.”

  “No, you’re missing the point entirely. If you bet someone that the Nile is longer than the Amazon, then of course the issue is whether you’re right. But if you bet someone that the next toss of a coin will turn up heads, being right has nothing to do with it. The issue is, will the universe back you up? If you say heads and it turns up heads, it doesn’t mean you’re
right, it means God is with you. You could just as easily have said tails, and if God wanted you to win, then it would have turned up tails. This is what every compulsive gambler is really trying to find out: ‘Are you with me, Lord, or against me?’ When Harlan wins, he feels as divinely affirmed as any saint, and when he loses for days on end, he knows the dark night of the soul, and God has abandoned him.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I see what you mean. I remember once, in five-card draw, being dealt the card I needed to fill an inside straight flush. Getting that card was definitely a religious experience. It was like a transfiguration. I expected everyone at the table to be blinded by the divine effulgence that was radiating from me.”

  “When you call it a religious experience, are you being facetious?”

  “Not at all. I suppose it was the kind of experience called oceanic. I was in a state of cosmic transcendence. I felt that the universe in that moment had taken notice of me. I was in touch with the fountainhead of meaning and being.”

  “A religious experience but presumably not a Christian experience.”

  “No, not a Christian experience.”

  “This oceanic feeling you describe has often been conjectured to be the source of the religious impulse, but only B traces that oceanic feeling to this patch of ground here in front of us, with its beetle scratchings and mouse scratchings. This is where we first began to reach into a dimension beyond the ken of any other creature on earth, a dimension that is surely not our own domain. But if we can imagine it to be anyone’s domain, then whose must it be?”