stence
aware of itself!

"If he killed, he gloried in the hot blood that drenched his hairless
nose, and he learned to laugh through the pleasure of a filled belly. He
learned to cry when he went hungry. Tears came, and emotions, a more
specialized instinct.

"He was learning something else, too. But pain still whipped him on,
filled him with fear of non-life, and he grew cowardly. Nature had
created a new thing, a brain, a specialized mass of cells that can
comment, realize, criticise, warn, appreciate, choose better food, get
it easier, help to conquer and promote life; the biped used this new
thing to understand why he ran from the fingers that clutched at him in
the dark and he became afraid. If it brought him new pain, it also
brought him new pleasure. It was a great toy that could be used to enjoy
oneself with.

"It can have the joy of bodily sensations and then recall them, study
them, comment on them, on its own instincts, its own memories. It can
dream of ways for procuring fuller life, and put the dreams into any
desired shape. Man struts from his jungle, laughing aloud, with lust for
life and joy at his fulness thereof. But all the while, pain, the
darkness, the still inert unconsciousness in existence that oppresses
and drags back into its own dead inertness, is laughing still more
heartily.

"Everywhere it checks, but man in his egotism forgets that he is a
slave, bound and hampered, and boasts himself master. Death sweeps in,
lightning kills, thunder crashes over him, and filled with fear, with
something bigger than he can grasp, he falls upon his knees, and cries,
'God!'

"Then begins the mess, the tangled, detestable, bloody, dirty, riotously
glorious, sublime mystery that is me. Me and you, Claire. Here we are."

Claire leaned over him, her breath suspended in her eagerness.

"Me, the man, specialized, sex-specialized, made to record, to enjoy, to
remember, to create, and to die at last from sheer wearing out myself
seeking life.

"And you, you the woman, deeper, more vitally sexed, more complete in
your memory of the past, more true in your record of it, less a sport,
more a true seeker and knower of life--you, the embodiment of it all,
memory, instinct, fear, passion, tenderness, hate--cunning, strong,
wise, far-seeing, and altogether mistress of the whole brute world,
mistress of everything in life and destiny save death. You, too, worn
out by struggling to live more fully, but not until y