SUM: Descent of Species

In the afterlife, you are treated to a generous opportunity: you can choose whatever you would like to be in the next life.

Would like to be a member of the opposite sex? Born into royalty? A philosopher with bottomless profundity? A soldier facing triumphant battles?

But perhaps you’ve just returned here from a hard life. Perhaps you were tortured by the enormity of the decisions and responsibilities that surrounded you, and now there’s only one thing you yearn for: simplicity.

That’s permissible. So for the next round, you choose to be a horse. You covet the bliss of that simple life: afternoons of grazing in the grassy fields, the handsome angles of your skeleton and the prominence of your muscles, the peace of the slow flicking tail or the steam rifling through your nostrils as you lope across snow blanketed plains.

You announce your decision. Incantations are muttered, a wand is waved, and your body begins to metamorphose into a horse. Your muscles start to bulge; a mat of strong hair erupts to cover you like a comfortable blanket in winter. The thickening and lengthening of your neck immediately feels normal as it comes about.

Your carotid arteries grow in diameter, your fingers blend hoofward, your knees stiffen, your hips strengthen, and meanwhile as your skull lengthens into its new shape, your brain races in its changes: your cortex retreats as your cerebellum grows, the homunculus melts man to horse, neurons redirect, synapses unplug and replug on their way to equestrian patterns, and your dream of understanding what it is like to be a horse gallops toward you from the distance.

Suddenly for just a moment, you are aware of the problem you overlooked. The more you become a horse, the more you forget the original wish. You forget what is was like to be a human wondering what it was like to be a horse.

This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails pecking moment, crouching half horse half man, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.

And that’s not the worst of your revelation. You realise that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won’t have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won’t understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible.

And just before your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.

Your concern about human affairs begins to slip away, your cynicism about human behaviour melts, and even your human way of thinking begins to drift away from you.