A few months ago, I went to the Natural History Museum in New York. For some reason, I always preferred science museums over art museums. I was the kind of kid who knew the difference between a triceratops and a diplodocus. Between a pterodactyl and an albertosaurus. I was part of that group of little nerds who knew the entire “The Land Before Time” series by heart and knew what the species shown were really called; Chomper was a tyrannosaurus, not a “sharptooth.” I also had a variety of books on dinosaurs, more or less scientific, with more or less neat illustrations. When I was interested in a topic, I would have my parents take me to Feltrinelli (a famous Italian bookshop) and after a few hours of research, flipping through the pages and being captivated by the most beautiful pictures, I would choose a book and once home I would read it carefully, studying every detail.
Certain images made me travel to faraway places and imagine the entire parallel lives I could live. I did the same thing with pirates when I had decided that one day I would be one of them: I bought a book and immersed myself in it, learning everything I might need for my future “profession.” Then one day my grandpa explained to me that being a pirate wasn’t exactly a job and that besides, the ones I saw in the movies didn’t exist anymore, now they were running around with machine guns. So I found myself reconsidering my plans for the future.
But back to the dinosaurs. At Christmas, I even asked for a little archaeologist’s kit and dinosaur eggs filled with brown slime with a plasticky smell that contained small dinosaurs, or a cube of compacted sand that contained the bones of a mini tyrannosaur inside. The purpose of the game was to dig, clean the bones, and assemble the small skeleton.
Something was fascinating about the discovery of this distant past. The idea that that wasn’t all, that there had been another reality buried by time, as fantastic and magical as my books of gnomes and fairies, but in this case, it was all real. Just as I was real and so were my drawings, the school, the playground, everything I knew, centuries, indeed millions of years ago there had been another world. The discovery of their romantic and tragic end probably contributed to my fascination with this lost world and taught me what death and the ephemerality of life were: a world stable for millions of years, with animals and plants reigning there unchallenged, swept away by a meteorite. For years, meteorites were my greatest secret fear (and I can’t say I have completely overcome it), a symbol of a distant and unpredictable force capable of destroying everything. For years, I could not even watch an astronomy documentary or simply hear the words “meteorite,” “asteroid,” or “comet” without feeling my blood run cold, with a grip on my stomach and the sensation of icy fingers gripping the base of the back of my neck. Unable to share this fear of mine, I thought that only I experienced such a feeling, that I was crazy. Instead, in time I realized that we all have a fear of death, of the blackness that sooner or later will reel us back in, of the abyss over which we all hang. It’s just that each of us gives it a different face because we need to give an image to what cannot be seen. For some it’s sharks, for others, it’s spiders, for others it’s viruses. For me it was meteorites. But as Steven King reminds us in the book It, fear has power only when we refuse to look it in the eye, and being afraid of death most of the time is just a signal that we are afraid of life, that’s so big and we can’t handle it.
In other moments in my life, at times when the present overwhelmed me, taking refuge in this mythical past was a great comfort. It was a way of reminding myself that every atom that constitutes me has existed for billions of years and has had thousands of other forms, that all of us are inextricably linked to every creature that has come before us, somewhat as Chekhov says in the short story “The Student”. Even though there is a whole universe in every person and every single life is important, we must remember that the real universe is huge, and boundless, with millions of billions of galaxies containing millions of billions of stars, some of them thousands of times the size of our Sun. Our life is indeed tiny, seen in perspective, but that doesn’t make it any less important and can’t be wasted lightly.
I remember that in school we started studying history with the invention of writing, as if before writing human beings could not think or feel and everything they had gone through for thousands of years didn’t matter. We devoted no more than two classes to prehistory. It was only years later, reading Sapiens by Harari, that I realized how long our history had been before writing and how those we call “cavemen” were so similar to us and in some ways perhaps even more evolved. After all, this idea of linear progress is something we made up and tacked onto history to make sense of it for our convenience. Prehistoric humans knew their environment in a way that we could not even imagine, they were able to survive in nature, which no doubt is unforgiving, but they were an integral part of it. Although their reality was extremely different from ours, they most likely used a similar language and felt the same emotions and fears as we do. How many times have I wondered what the world must have been like in their eyes? Perhaps without all the stimuli and impulses we have now, they could see the truest and most important things sharply. Like when we get out of the city and without all the light and noise pollution we are always immersed in, we can finally see the stars and hear the crickets.
I would like to be able to regain that awe that they must have had when they were looking at the world, an awe that is felt when we stand before their artworks, which represents a sense of wonder and respect, without any arrogance.
