Doing and Un-doing and Doing Again

　　I realised, though I was on Earth, I had been living this past year as I had always lived. I was just thinking I could carry on, moving forward. But I was not me any more. I was a human, give or take. And humans are about change. This is how they survive, by doing and un-doing and doing again.

　　I had done some things I couldn't undo, but there were others I could amend. I had become a human by betraying rationality and obeying feeling. To stay me, I knew there would come a point when I would have to do the same again.

　　Time passed.

　　Squinting, I looked again to the sky.

　　The Earth's sun can look very much alone, yet it has relatives all across this galaxy, stars that were born in the exact same place, but which were now very far away from each other, lighting very different worlds.

　　I was like a sun.

　　I was a long way from where I started. And I have changed. Once I thought I could pass through time like a neutrino passes through matter, effortlessly and without stopping to think, because time would never run out.

The Humans, P288
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Advice for a Human

Advice for a human

　　1. ... ...

　　2. Don't worry about your abilities. You have the ability to love. That is enough.

　　3. Be nice to other people. At the universal level, they are you.

　　... ...

　　7. Irony is fine, but not as fine as feeling.

　　8. ... ...

　　9. Sometimes, to be yourself you will have to forget yourself and become something else. Your character is not a fixed thing. You will sometimes have to move to keep up with it.

　　... ...

　　13. You shouldn't have been born. Your existence is as close to impossible as can be. To dismiss the impossible is to dismiss yourself.

　　14. Your live will have 25,0000 days in it. Make sure you remember some of them.

　　... ...

　　25. There is only one genre in fiction. The genre is called 'book'.

　　... ...

　　29. If there is a sunset, stop and look at it. Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.

　　... ....

　　33. You are not the most intelligent creature in the universe. You are not even the most intelligent creature on your planet. Yhe tonal language in the song of a humpback whale displays more complexity than the entire works of Shakespeare. It is not a competition. Well, it is. But don't worry about it.

　　... ...

　　38. Walt Whitman was right about at least one thing. You will contradict yourself. You are large. You contain multitudes.

　　... ...

　　41. Your brain is open. Never let it be closed.

　　42. In a thousand years, if humans survive that long, everything you know will have been disapproved. And replaced by even bigger myths.

　　... ...

　　46. A paradox. The things you don't need to live - books, art, cinema, wine and so on - are things you need to live.

　　47. ... ...

　　48. No two moralities match. Accept different shapes, so long as they aren't sharp enough to hurt.

　　... ...

　　51. Alcohol in the evening is very enjoyable. Hangovers in the mornings are very unpleasant. At some point you have to choose: evenings, or mornings.

　　... ...

　　60. Obey your head. Obey your heart. Obey your gut. In fact, obey everything except commands.

　　61. One day, if you get into a position of power, tell people this: just because you can, it doesn't mean you should. There is a power and a beauty in unproved conjectures, unkissed lips and unpicked flowers.

　　... ...

　　65. Don't think you know. Know you think.

　　... ...

　　74. A quark is not the smallest thing. The wish you have on your death-bed - to have worked harder - that is the smallest thing. Because it won't be there.

　　75. Politeness is often fear. Kindness is always courage. But caring is what makes human. Care more, become more human.

　　76. In your mind, change the name of every day to Saturday. And change the name of work to play.

　　... ...

　　81. You can't find happiness looking for the meaning of life. Meaning is only the third important thing. It comes after loving and being.

　　82. If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.

　　83. ... ...

　　84. Your are more than the sum of your particles. And that is quite a sum.

　　85. ... ...

　　86. To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As Civilisation advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunise yourself with art. And love.

　　... ...

　　90. But know this. Men are not from Mars. Women are not from Venus. Do not fall for categories. Everyone is everything. Every ingredient inside a star is inside you, and every personality that ever existed competes in the theatre of your mind for the main role.

　　... ...

　　94. You don't have to be an academic. You don't have to be anything. Don't force it. Feel your way, and don't stop feeling your way until something fits. Maybe nothing will. Maybe you are a road, not a destination. That is fine. Be a road. But make sure it's one with something to look at out of the window.

　　... ...

　　97. I love you. Remember that.

The Humans, P271-277
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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True Love Had Its Name for A Reason

　　I briefly toyed with the idea that I should try to convince her that nothing I had told her was true. That we were more magical realism than science fiction, specifically that branch of literary fiction that comes complete with an unreliable narrator. That I wasn't really an alien. That I was a human who'd had a breakdown, and there was nothing extraterrestrial or extramarital about me. Gulliver might have known what he had seen, but Gulliver had a fragile mind. I could easily denied everything. A dog's health fluctuates. People fall off roofs and survive. After all, humans - especially adult ones - want to believe the most mundane truths possible. They need to, in order to stop their worldviews, and their sanity, from capsizing and plunging them into the vast ocean of incomprehensible.

　　But it seemed too disrespectful, somehow, and I couldn't do it. Lies were everywhere on this planet, but true love had its name for a reason. And if a narrator tells you it was just a dream, you want to tell him he has simply passed from one delusion into another one, and he could wake from this new reality at any time. You had to stay consistent to life's delusions. All you had was your perspective, so objective truth was meaningless. You has to choose a dream and stick with it. Everything else was a con. And once you had tasted truth and love in the same potent cocktail, there had to be no more tricks. But while I knew I couldn't correct this version of things with any integrity, living with it was hard.

The Humans, P263-264
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Molecules Within The Beast

　　He sighed and shook his head. "No, I do not think that," he said, in a voice which was mine but deeper, somehow, and flatter. "I do not see a separation. I have lived with a human for only a few days, but I have seen violence and hypocrisy that runs through this species."

　　"Yes, but there is good in them. A lot of good."

　　"No. I don't see it. They can sit and watch dead human bodies on TV screens and feel nothing at all."

　　"That's how I saw it at first, but-"

　　"They can drive thirty miles every day and feel good about themselves for recycling a couple of empty jam jars. They can talk about peace being a good thing yet glorify war. They can despise the man who kills his wife in rage but worship the indifferent soldier who drops a bomb killing a hundred children."

　　"Yes, there is a bad logic here, I agree with you, yet I truly believe-"

　　He wasn't listening. He stood up now, state at me with determined eyes as he paced the room and delivered his speech. "They believe God is always on their side, even if their side is at odds with the rest of their species. They have no way of coming to terms with what are, biologically, the most import events that happen to them - procreation and death. They pretend to know that money can't buy happiness, yet they would choose money every time. They celebrate mediocrity at every available opportunity and love to see other's misfortune. 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. In fact, they know less now than they once did."

　　"You're right, but don't you think there is something beautiful in these contradictions, something mysterious?"

　　"No. No, I do not. What I think is that their violence will has helped them dominate the world and 'civilize' it, but now there is nowhere left for them to go, and so the human world has turned in on itself. It is a monster that feats on its own hands. And still they do not see the monster, or if they do, they do not see that they are inside it, molecules within the beast."

　　... ...

The Humans, P248-249
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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A Hard Thing to Get It Right

　　She had stuff to give, but it was ungiven; it was locked away.

　　And I felt an incredible excitement at being able to witness the love reemerge inside her, because it was a total, prime-of-life love. The kind that could only be possible in someone who was going to die at some point in the future, and also someone who had lived enough to know that loving and being loved back was a hard thing to get right, but when you managed it, you could see forever.

　　Two mirrors, opposite and facing each other at perfectly parallel angles, viewing themselves through the other, the view as deep as infinity.

　　Yes, that was what love was for. (I may not have understood marriage, but I understood love, I was sure of it.) Love was a way to live forever in a single moment, and it was also a way to see yourself as you had never actually seen yourself, and made you realize - having done so - that this view was a more meaningful one than any of your previous self-perceptions and self depictions. Even though, the big joke was, indeed the very biggest joke in the universe was, that Isobel Martin believed I had always been a human called Andrew Martin who had been born 100 miles away in Sheffield, and not in fact 8,653,178,431 light years away.

The Humans, P208-209
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Heaven is a Place where Nothing Ever Happens

Heaven is a Place where Nothing Ever Happens

　　I was back at home, on Vonnadoria, and it was exactly how it had always been. And I was exactly how I had always been, among them, the hosts, feeling no pain and no fear.

　　Our beautiful, warless world, where I could be entranced by the purest mathematics for all eternity.

　　Any human who arrived here, gazing at our violet landscapes, might well have believed they had 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 liven things up? Didn't light need shade? Didn't it? Maybe it didn't. Maybe I was missing the point. Yes, to exist with an absence of pain. Yes, maybe that was the only aim you needed in life. It certainly had been, but what happened if you'd never required that aim because you were born after that goal had been met? I was younger than the hosts. I did not share their appreciation of just how lucky I was. Not anymore. Not even in a dream.

The Humans, P174
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Once It Started to Slip It Gained Mass

　　... ... . Human life, I realised, got progressively worse as you got older, by the sound of things. You arrived, with baby feet and hands and infinite happiness, and then the happiness slowly evaporated as your feet and hands grew bigger. And then, from the teenage years onwards, happiness was something you could lose your grip of and once it started to slip it gained mass. It was as if the knowledge that it could slip was the thing that made it more difficult to hold, no matter how big your feet and hands were.

The Humans, P117
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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The pleasure of Counting without Realising You were Counting

　　This primitivism struck me as funny. And so was the idea that the music had anything whatsoever to do with those dead planets. But it seemed to soothe Newton a little bit, and I must admit one or two parts of it had some kind of effect on me, a kind of electrochemical effect. Listening to music, I realised, was simply the pleasure of counting without realising you were counting. As electrical impulses were transported from the neurons in my ear through my body, I felt - I don't know - calm. It made that strange unease that had been with me since I had watched Daniel Russell die on his carpet settle a little.

The Humans, P99
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Because of It

　　There are other questions, too, that humans have in bookstores. Such as, as it one of those books they read to feel clever, or one of those they will pretend never to have read in order to stay looking clever? Will it make them laugh, or cry? Or will it simply force them to stare out of the window watching the tracks of raindrops? Is it a true story? Or is it a false one? Is it the kind of story that will work on their brain or one which aims for lower organs? is it one of those books that ends up acquiring religious followers or getting burned by them? Is it a book about mathematics or - like everything else in the universe - simply because of it?

　　Yes, there are lots of questions. And even more books. So, so many. Humans in their typical Human way have written for too many to get through. Reading is added to that great pile of things - work, love, sexual prowess, the word they didn't say when they really needed to say them - that they are bound to feel a bit dissatisfied about.

The Humans, P18-19
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Beauty - be not Caused, It is

　　This was, I realised, a beautiful planet. Maybe it was the most beautiful of all. But beauty creates its own troubles. You look at a waterfall or an ocean or a sunset, and you find yourself wanting to share it with someone.

　　"Beauty - be not caused," said Emily Dickinson. "It is."

　　In one way she was wrong The scattering of light over a long distances creates a sunset. The crashing of ocean waves on a beach is created by tides, which are themselves the result of gravitational forces exerted by the sun and the moon and the rotation of the Earth. Those are causes.

　　The mystery lies in how those things become beautiful.

　　And they wouldn't have been beautiful once, at least not to my eyes. To experience beauty on Earth, you needed to experience pain and to know mortality. This shy so much that is beautiful on this planet has to do with time passing and Earth turning. Which might also explain why to look at such natural beauty was to also feel sadness and a craving for a life unlived.

The Humans, P283
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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The Nature of Reality

The Nature of Reality

Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge
number of illusions in which we all collaborate
willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while
that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked
when reality is torn down around us.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　- J. G. Ballard

　　What was reality?

　　An objective truth? A collective illusion? A major opinion? The product of historical understanding? A dream? A dream. Well, yes, maybe. But if this had been a dream, then it was one from which I hadn't yet woken.

　　But once humans really study things in depth - whether in the artificially divided fields of quantum physics or biology or neuroscience or mathematics or love - they come closer and closer to nonsense, irrationality, and anarchy. Everything they know is disproved, over and over again. The Earth is not flat; leeches have no medicinal value; there is no God; progress is a myth; the present is all they have.

　　And this doesn't just happen on the big scale. It happens to each individual too.

　　In every human life there is a moment. A crisis. One that says, what I believe is wrong. It happens to everyone, the only difference being how that knowledge changes them. In most cases, it is simply a case of burying that knowledge and pretending it isn't there. That is how humans grow old. That is ultimately what creases their faces and curves their backs and shrink their mouths and ambitions. The weight of denial. The stress of it. This is not unique to humans. The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is act of change.

　　I was something. And now I am something else.

　　I was a monster and now I am a different type of monster. One that will die and feel pain, but one that also will live, and maybe even find happiness one day. Because happiness is possible for me now. It exists on the other side of the hurt.

The Humans, P259-260
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Doing Things They Didn't Like Doing

　　'I don't know why more people don't do this,' I said, striking up a conversation.

　　'Do what?'

　　'You know, get drunk. Sit on a park bench. It seems like a good way to solve problems.'

　　'Are you taking the piss, fella?'

　　'No. I like it. And you obviously like it or you wouldn't be doing it.'

　　of course, this as a little bit disingenuous of me. Humans were always doing things they didn't like doing. In fact, to my best estimate, at any one time only point three percent of humans were actively doing something they liked doing, and even when they did so, they felt an intense amount of guilt about it and were fervently promising themselves they'd be back doing something horrendously unpleasant shortly.

The Humans, P241
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Sound of A Truth Hitting A Lie

　　'Are we going to have sex?'

　　She laughed some more. Laughter, I realised, was the reverberating sound of a truth hitting a lie. Humans existed inside their own delusions and laughing was a way out - the only possible bridge they had between each other. That, and love. ... ...

The Humans, P232
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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It Could Only be Caught by Letting Go

　　'I love you,' she said.

　　And I knew the point of love right then.

　　The point of love was to help you survive.

　　The point was also to forget meaning. To stop looking and start living. The meaning was to hold the hand of someone you cared about and live inside the present. Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was. The ever-moving, ever-changing present. And the present was fickle. It could only be caught by letting go.

　　So I let go.

　　I let go of everything in the universe.

　　Everything except her hand.

The Humans, P221-222
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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The Luck That Brought That Person There

　　You see, when you looked at a human's face, you had to comprehend the luck that brought that person there. Isobel Martin has a total of 150,000 generations before her, and that only includes the humans. That was 150,000 increasingly unlikely copulations resulting in increasingly unlikely children. That was a one in quadrillion chance multiplied bu another quadrillion for every generation.

　　Or around twenty thousand times more than the number of the atoms in the universe. But even that was only the start of it, because humans had only been around for three million Earth years, certainly a very short time compared to the three and a half billion years since life first appeared on this planet.

　　Therefore, mathematically, rounding things up, there was no chance at all that Isobel Martin could have existed. A zero in ten-to-the-power-of-forever chance. And yet there she was, in front of me, and I was quite taken aback by it all; I really was. Suddenly it made me realise why religion was such a big thing around here. Because, yes, sure, God could not exist. But then neither could humans. So, if they believed in themselves - the logic must go - why not believe in something that was only a fraction more unlikely?

The Humans, P207
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Tested Fermentation

　　I hadn't tried wine before so I said yes, as it really did seem to be very revered substance. It was a mild night so Isobel poured me a glass and we sat outside in the garden. Newton decided to stay indoors. I looked at the transparent yellow fluid in the glass. I tasted it and tasted fermentation. In other words I tasted life on Earth. For everything that lives here ferments, ages, becomes diseased. But as things made their decline from ripeness they could taste wonderful, I realised.

The Humans, P202
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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They Only Had Saturdays

　　Belonging as I did to a species which had only ever really known one day, there was initially something quite exciting about having any kind of rhythm at all. But now I was stuck here for good I began to resent humans lack of imagination. I believed they should have tried a little more variety into proceedings. I mean, this was the species whose main excuse for not doing something was 'if only I had more time'. Perfectly valid until you realised they did have more time. Not eternity, granted, but they had tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And the day after the day after tomorrow. In fact I would have had to write 'the day after' thirty thousand times before a final 'tomorrow' in order to illustrate the amount of time on a human hands.

　　The problem lying behind the lack of human fulfillment was a shortage not just of time but imagination. They found a day that worked for them and then stuck to it, and repeat it, at least between Monday and Friday. Even if it didn't work for them - as usually the case - they stuck to it anyway. Then they'd alter things a bit and do something a little bit more fun on Saturday and Sunday.

　　One initial proposal I wanted to put to them was to swap things over. For instance, have five fun days and two not-fun days. That way - call me a mathematical genius - they would have more fun. But as things stood, there weren't even two fun days. They only had Saturdays, because Mondays were a little bit too close to Sundays for Sunday's liking, as if Monday were a collapsed star in the week's solar system, with an excessive gravitational pull. In other words one seventh of human days worked quite well. The other six weren't very good, and five of those were roughly the same say stuck on repeat.

　　... ...

The Humans, P197-198
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Everything was Impossible

　　You are not dead. Gulliver, you are not dead.

　　I kept at it, because I knew what life was, I understood its nature, its character, it stubborn insistence.

　　Life, especially human life, was an act of defiance. It was never meant to be, and yet it existed in an incredible number of places across a near-infinite amount of solar systems.

　　There was no such thing as impossible. I knew that, because I also knew that everything was impossible, and so the only possibilities in life were impossibilities.

The Humans, P172
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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It Made No Sense

　　And hope was often irrational. It made no sense. If it had made sense it would have been called, well, sense. The other thing about hope was that it took effort, and I had never been used to effort. At home, nothing had been an effort. That was the whole point of home, the comfort of a perfectly effortless existence. Yet there I was. Hoping. Not that I was standing there, passively, just wishing him better from a distance. Of course not. I placed my hand - my gift hand - to his heart, and I began to work.

The Humans, P171
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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The Possibility of Pain is Where Love Stems From

　　'Listen,' I found myself saying, 'he is going to have to find his own way, to make his own mistakes.'

　　'We need to find out who did that to him, Andrew. That's what we need to do. People can't just go around inflicting violence on human beings like that. They just can't do that. What ethical code do you live by where you can sound so indifferent about it?'

　　What could I say? 'I'm sorry. I'm not indifferent. I care for him, of course I do.' And the terrifying thing, the absolutely awful fact I had to face, was that I was right. I did care. The warning had failed, you see. Indeed, it had had the opposite effect.

　　That's what starts to happen, when you know it is possible for you to feel pain you have no control over. You become vulnerable. Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from. And that, for me, was very bad news indeed.

The Humans, P165
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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