Reading Notes: Transcendent Kingdom

Yaa Gyasi

"Though I had done this millions of times, it still awed me to see a brain. To know that if I could only understand this little organ inside this one tiny mouse, that understanding still wouldn't speak to the full intricacy of the comparable organ inside my own head. And yet I had to try to understand, to extrapolate from that limited understanding, to apply it to those of us who made up the species Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom... That belief, that transcendence, was held within this organ itself. Infinite, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical."

"There was no war in my mother's stories, and if there was hunger, it was of a different kind, the simple hunger of those who had been fed one thing but wanted another. A simple hunger, impossible to satisfy."

""What's the point of all of this?" is a question that separates humans from other animals. Our curiosity around this issue has sparked everything from science to literature to philosophy to religion. When the answer to this question is "Because God deemed it so," we might feel comforted. But what if the answer to this question is "I don't know", or worse still, "Nothing"?"

"In the beginning, there was an idea, a premise; there was a question."

"We humans are reckless with our bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully."