The Humans
Authors: Matt Haig
Published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Matt Haig, 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Quotation taken from interview with J. G. Ballard, © 2003, J. G. Ballard, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Ltd.
Lyrics from ‘This Must Be The Place’ by David Byrne courtesy Index Music Inc.
Extract from ‘That it will never come again’ by Emily Dickinson reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from
The Poems of
Emily Dickinson
, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College.
Michael Franti quotation reproduced by kind permission of Guerilla Management Collective.
Extract from
Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace reproduced by kind permission of the Hill Nadell Literary Agency.
Extract from
The End of the Affair
by Graham Greene (Random House) reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates.
Extract from
Music of the Primes
by Marcus du Sautoy reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 2004 Marcus du Sautoy.
Extract from
Contact
by Carl Sagan copyright © 1985 Druyan-Sagan Associates, Inc. formerly known as Carl Sagan Productions, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Druyan-Sagan Associates, Inc. This material cannot be further circulated without written permission of Druyan-Sagan Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 875 6
Export ISBN 978 0 85786 876 3
eISBN 978 0 85786 877 0
Typeset in Minion by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire
To Andrea, Lucas and Pearl
I have just got a new theory of eternity.
– Albert Einstein
(An illogical hope in the face of overwhelming adversity)
Detached nouns and other early trials for the language-learner
The world as will and representation
The distribution of prime numbers
Crunchy wholenut peanut butter
A few seconds of silence over breakfast
Sloping roofs (and other ways to deal with the rain)
Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens
Two weeks in the Dordogne and a box of dominoes
The wounded deer leaps the highest
An encounter with Winston Churchill
The melancholy beauty of the setting sun
A note, and some acknowledgements
(An illogical hope in the face of overwhelming adversity)
I know that some of you reading this are convinced humans are a myth, but I am here to state that they do actually exist. For those that don’t know, a human is a real
bipedal lifeform of mid-range intelligence, living a largely deluded existence on a small water-logged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe.
For the rest of you, and those who sent me, humans are in many respects exactly as strange as you would expect them to be. Certainly it is true that on a first sighting you would be appalled by
their physical appearance.
Their faces alone contain all manner of hideous curiosities. A protuberant central nose, thin-skinned lips, primitive external auditory organs known as ‘ears’, tiny eyes and
unfathomably pointless eye
brows
. All of which take a long time to mentally absorb and accept.
The manners and social customs too are a baffling enigma at first. Their conversation topics are very rarely the things they want to be talking about, and I could write ninety-seven books on
body shame and clothing etiquette before you would get even close to understanding them.
Oh, and let’s not forget The Things They Do To Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This is an infinite list. It includes – shopping, watching TV, taking the
better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semi-autobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old, and harbouring a vague desire to believe there might be a
meaning to it all.
Yes, it is all very amusing, in a painful kind of way. But I have discovered human poetry while on Earth. One of these poets, the very best one (her name was Emily Dickinson), said this:
‘I dwell in possibility.’ So let us humour ourselves and do the same. Let us open our minds entirely, for what you are about to read will need every prejudice you may have to stand
aside in the name of understanding.
And let us consider this: what if there actually
is
a meaning to human life? And what if – humour me – life on Earth is something not just to fear and ridicule but also
cherish? What then?
Some of you may know what I have done by now, but none of you know the reason. This document, this guide, this account – call it what you will – will make everything clear. I plead
with you to read this book with an open mind, and to work out for yourself the true value of human life.
Let there be peace.
I took my power in my hand
The man I was not
So, what is this?
You ready?
Okay. Inhale. I will tell you.
This book, this actual book, is set right
here
, on Earth. It is about the meaning of life and nothing at all. It is about what it takes to kill somebody, and save them. It is about love
and dead poets and wholenut peanut butter. It’s about matter and antimatter, everything and nothing, hope and hate. It’s about a forty-one-year-old female historian called Isobel and
her fifteen-year-old son called Gulliver and the cleverest mathematician in the world. It is, in short, about how to become a human.
But let me state the obvious. I was not one. That first night, in the cold and the dark and the wind, I was nowhere near. Before I read
Cosmopolitan
, in the garage, I had never even seen
this written language. I realise that this could be your first time too. To give you an idea of the way people here consume stories, I have put this book together as a human would. The words I use
are human words, typed in a human font, laid out consecutively in the human style. With your almost instantaneous ability to translate even the most exotic and primitive linguistic forms, I trust
comprehension should not be a problem.
Now, to reiterate, I was not Professor Andrew Martin. I was like you.
Professor Andrew Martin was merely a role. A disguise. Someone I needed to be in order to complete a task. A task that had begun with his abduction, and death. (I am conscious this is setting a
grim tone, so I will resolve not to mention death again for at least the rest of this page.)
The point is that I was not a forty-three-year-old mathematician – husband, father – who taught at Cambridge University and who had devoted the last eight years of his life to
solving a mathematical problem that had so far proved unsolvable.
Prior to arriving on Earth I did not have mid-brown hair that fell in a natural side-parting. Equally, I did not have an opinion on
The Planets
by Holtz or Talking Heads’ second
album, as I did not agree with the concept of music. Or I shouldn’t have, anyway. And how could I believe that Australian wine was automatically inferior to wine sourced from other regions on
the planet when I had never drunk anything but liquid nitrogen?
Belonging as I did to a post-marital species, it goes without saying that I hadn’t been a neglectful husband with an eye for one of my students any more than I had been a man who walked
his English Springer Spaniel – a category of hairy domestic deity otherwise known as a ‘dog’ – as an excuse to leave the house. Nor had I written books on mathematics, or
insisted that my publishers use an author photograph that was now nearing its fifteenth anniversary.
No, I wasn’t that man.
I had no feeling for that man whatsoever. And yet he had been real, as real as you and I, a real mammalian life form, a diploid, eukaryotic primate who, five minutes before midnight, had been
sitting at his desk, staring at his computer screen and drinking black coffee (don’t worry, I shall explain coffee and my misadventures with it a little later). A life form who may or may not
have jumped out of his chair as the breakthrough came, as his mind arrived at a place no human mind had ever reached before, the very edge of knowledge.
And at some point shortly after his breakthrough he had been taken by the hosts. My employers. I had even met him, for the very briefest of moments. Enough for the – wholly incomplete
– reading to be made. It was complete physically, just not mentally. You see, you can clone human brains but not what is stored inside them, not much of it anyway, so I had to learn a lot of
things for myself. I was a forty-three-year-old newborn on planet Earth. It would become annoying to me, later on, that I had never met him
properly
, as meeting him properly would have been
extremely useful. He could have told me about Maggie, for one thing. (Oh, how I wish he had told me about Maggie!)