Sublime

David Hynes,

existential crisis. But the school wanted to do better,

a unidirectional form of what he calls ‘unscrupulous optimism’.

I asked them to imagine what it would be like if we lived in a world where, no matter how deeply we dug, we kept finding traces of an earlier era of the world. I asked them to imagine being confronted with proof of a past extending so far back that the numbers lost all meaning: a hundred thousand years, a million years, ten million years. Then I

Ed Spriggs

anarchy.

Prior to Darwin’s account of life’s slow ascent from bacteria to Bach, it was easier to believe in a kind of special creation, where having first made the cosmos God then sculpted each species in its finished form, making every plant and animal’s mere existence a standing proof of the miraculous. The mechanism of evolution by natural selection, by

protect