Читать книгу The Book of Gratitudes - Pablo R. Andiñach - Страница 6

Human beings are inhabitants of the Pleistocene Age or, if we wish to be more precise, the Holocene Era. Anthropology tells us that the Homo species became what we now call Homo sapiens some two hundred thousand years ago. This “claiming to know”—this is what the word sapiens means—should not keep us from reflecting upon our behavior and acknowledging the fact that in many cases, we are closer today to some irrational ancestor, than to a well-balanced being capable of facing reality with utmost consciousness.

However, further specification was sought and thus Anthropology tells us that closer to us, only some fifty thousand years ago, stands Sapiens sapiens, that is, the Homo who knows he knows; the human being of today, in other words, us. But this maximum knowledge of our species grows dim when we consider the performance of men and women, our contradictions and violence, our ravings that seem to be guiding us to some sort of collective suicide, our pettiness that distance us from those whom with must live with and build an inhabitable world.

The knowledge which has allowed us to dominate nature to such an extent that we have almost eradicated age-old diseases, to be aware of things so small that it is hard to imagine they exist, or something so large that it exceeds all efforts to understand it, this same knowledge has not served to eradicate the poverty and starvation of our own brothers and sisters. Moreover, at times it seems that more intelligence is dedicated to perfecting the structure that creates poverty on the one hand and superabundance on the other, than to overcoming this scourge.

There is no doubt that humans are the most intelligent beings on Earth and that we are capable of noble and heroic acts. Despite our erratic and even unhealthy behavior, we are even dying for something practically undefinable that we call love.

As biological beings, we have bodies that strive to find food and water, and to ensure those two or three minutes of oxygen essential to the continuity of life. However, together with this indisputable material reality, we as human beings perceive a deep dimension in our lives that has to do with the ability to see beyond the surface of things, to conceive reality as a space greater than mere visual or tactile appearance. Also, to know that the life that beats inside is more than the body that is exposed to the weather or modestly covered. The poet Walt Whitman said it with characteristic beauty:

. . .and am not contain’d

between my hat and my boots.

(From Walt Whitman, Song of Myself)