Our beautiful, warless world, where I could be entranced by the purest mathematics for all eternity.
Any human who arrive here, gazing at our violet landscapes, might well have believed they have entered Heaven.
But what happened in Heaven?
‘What did you do there?’
After a while, didn’t you crave flaws? Love and lust and misunderstandings, and maybe even a little violence to lighten things up? Didn’t light need shade? Didn’t it?’ Matt Haig, The Humans p174
I like that.
I found Matt Haig’s happy book The Humans (about an alien who takes the body of a maths lecturer to stop human progress) irresistable. Not least because like some other books I know, namely my own, it is set in Cambridge and also in some complete other world.
He uses the alien-being-human trope to explore fun, slanted views on human life, well worth a read. Here’s another:
They have no way of coming to terms with what are, biologically, the two most important things that happen to them –procreation and death … They have lived on this planet for over a hundred thousand generations and yet they still have no idea about who they really are or how they should really live. (p248)