The
Leviathan and the Cell
We
are living in a leviathan, a mighty organism.
Indeed we are mere cells in the swollen body
of a great beast. The thought came upon me suddenly
one night in Cheshire when I lived on my canal
boat.
We
are all inhabitants of Leviathans, save for
small groups who live in remote places without
communication with the outside world.
Radios,
televisions, telephones and computers link even
the solitary to the mass of human activity most
characterised by the Leviathan. We are sharing,
like it or not, in a vast new experience of
communal living, communal thinking, communal
feeling.
There
I was living in a steel box all alone on a canal
in late winter, going out for a walk in the
night. I was a case in point. I was a bit of
a loner, painting, thinking, writing poetry
and stuff, but through my teaching and the ever-welcome
presence of BBC Radio 4 keeping in touch with
the heartbeat of the great Leviathan, or should
I say the great Leviathans.
That
is one of the later discoveries of my life.
The world is full of Leviathan, great and small,
ancient and quite new, beautiful and clean,
foul sewers of pestilence and depravity. Everywhere
almost they are sprawling and spawning like
fungus or lichen over the land.
The
phenomena has been developing
in our species only for the last 9,000 years,
as far as we can tell, shortly after the last
ice age they began to appear, a mere heart beat
of time in the story of life itself. Phenomenal
success has characterised the development. Within
the shelter of the urban environment our species
has vastly increased its population, and thousands
of similar creatures have budded off and established
themselves over the surface of the planet. No
halt to this progress is yet in sight.
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