At the center of our
world is home ground. In the center of the center are shelters backed against a
rock wall. From the shelters radiate well-traveled paths where every tree and
rock is familiar. Beyond lies opportunity for expansion and riches. Down a
river, through a wooded corridor lining the opposite shore, are campsites in
grassy places where game and food plants are seasonally abundant. Such
opportunities are balanced by risk. We might lose our way on a too-distant
foray. A storm can catch us. Neighboring people – poisoners, cannibals, not
fully human – will either trade or attack; we can only guess their intentions.
In any case they are an impassable barrier. On the other side is the rim of the
world, perhaps glimpsed as a mountain front, or a drop toward the sea. Anything
could be out there: dragons, demons, gods, paradise, eternal life. Our
ancestors came from there. Spirits we know live closer by, and at fall of night
are on the move. So much in intangible and strange! We know a little, enough to
survive, but all the rest of the world is a mystery.
What is this mystery we find so attractive? It is not a mere
puzzle waiting to be solved. It is far more than that, something still too
amorphous, too poorly understood to be broken down into puzzles. Our minds
travel easily – eagerly! – from the familiar and tangible to the mystic realm.
Today the entire planet has become home ground. Global information networks are
its radiating trails. But the mystic realm has not vanished; it has just
retreated, first from the foreground and then from the distant mountains. Now
we look for it in the stars, in the unknowable future, in the still teasing
possibility of the supernatural. Both the known and the unknown, the two worlds
of our ancestors, nourish the human spirit. Their muses, science and the arts,
whisper: Follow us, explore, find out.
-E. O. Wilson, Consilience,
1998.
