The Meaning of Life: from the pages of the Little, Brown book - excerpts - Special Supplement to Sunset

Sunset, Dec, 1991 by David Friend, C.J. Vitulli, Helen Caldicott, Leah de Roulet, Yakov Smirnoff, Norman Vincent Peale, Stephen Jay Gould, Maya Ying Lin

Yakov Smirnoff, comedian, is a Soviet emigre to the U.S.

We are here to be excited from youth to old age, to have an insatiable curiosity about the world. Aldous Huxley once said that to carry the spirit of the child into old age is the secret of genius. And I buy that. We are also here to genuinely, humbly and sincerely help others by practicing a friendly attitude. And every peron is born for a purpose. Everyone has a God-given potential, in essence, built into them. And if we are to live life to its fullest, we must realize that potential.

Norman Vincent Peale, Protestant pastor, wrote The Power of Positive Thinking.

The human species has inhabited this planet for only 250,000 years or so--roughly .0015 percent of the history of life, the last inch of the cosmic mile. The world fared perfectly well without us for all but the last moment of earthly time--and this fact makes our appearance look more like an accidental afterthought than the culmination of a prefigured plan.

Moreover, and more important, the pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable. Human evolution is not random; it makes sense and can be explained after the fact. But wind back life's tape to the dawn of time and let it play again--and you will never get humans a second time.

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestial creatures; because comets struck the earth and wiped out dinosaurs, thereby giving mammals a chance not otherwise available (so thank your lucky stars in a literal sense); because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a "higher" answer--but none exists. This explanation, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating. We cannot read the meaning of life passively in the facts of nature. We must construct these answers to ourselves--from our own wisdom and ethical sense. There is no other way.

Stephen Jay Gould is a paleontologist, essayist and humanist.