BACKWARDS TO BLISS
Meyer, Ernest L.
Backwards To Bliss By ERNEST L. MEYER SEVERAL DAYS AGO the British astronomer, Sir James Jeans, made this interesting observation in an address at Bristol: "If it is true that there is life...
...And in the name of its future billions of happy generations, I demaud that we call progress a fraud and go backwards in the evolutionary scale...
...And moved by indomitable will and three billion years of experience in the art of devolution, they were...
...The squids put it into effect immediately by learning to swim backwards...
...It is possible that civili- zation is a thing that comes to a planet and passes in a flash...
...Here and there a squid who raced forward, or who showed any ambitious sign of evolving into a more complex form, was promptly put to death...
...So thus the amoeba, still loyal to the law of retrogression, changed into still more minute and simple forms, and then relinquished all sensate life to merge with inorganic matter...
...Perhaps it carries the seeds of its own destruction...
...Let us call our planet Retrogradius the Magnificent...
...Fellow squids, I urge you to call a halt...
...It was not always possible to get the right kind of food morsels, and moving about in search of succulent bits entailed labor, and a kind of hateful and dangerous ambition...
...It might be discovered that the life forms on Planet X long ago learned the idiocy of notions like evolution and progress...
...These, too, must be checked...
...His propagation was a painless cellular division, and his locomotion leisurely and dignified...
...It appears that we are headed in the same direction, and I urge upon my brother squids to take heed...
...Thereupon, the law of retrogression was passed by an overwhelming majority...
...Backwards To Bliss By ERNEST L. MEYER SEVERAL DAYS AGO the British astronomer, Sir James Jeans, made this interesting observation in an address at Bristol: "If it is true that there is life similar to our own on other planets...
...The astronomer's statement leads to fascinating speculation...
...That is man...
...But even here that was no perfect tranquillity...
...And in that dim tomorrow of our own world, it may...
...be that scientists will learn that the planet Retrpgra-dius the Magnificent, a nebular mist in the far reaches of heaven, is a sphere deader than death itself, on which no protoplasm festers with unsatisfied longings and no atoms clash within their molecular prisons, and which glistens calmly and steel-cold amid the other spheres hurtling their living freight through an eternity of anguish...
...Still Imperfect Bliss Then, by a curious devolutionary process as yet unknown by the scientists of our world, the squid, by a few million years of conscientious effort, changed into a fish, a jelly-fish, an infusoria, and eventually back into an amoeba...
...At What A Cost' "I have heard," we can imagine the chief squid saying, "that below us in the stellar spaces there is an earth-sphere inhabited by a race that has evolved slowly from the protozoan through the stage of fish, amphibian, mammal, monkey, and man...
...Molecular and atomic action is a form of unrest, of striving...
...Despite his vaunted intelligence, man lacks the ingenuity to provide all of his tribe with food and shelter, such as 'was enjoyed by the ooziest amoeba...
...Mankind's knowledge of destruction has increased, and as far as we can say will go on increasing...
...Does civilization, with its technological speedup, merely hasten the end of civilization...
...And then, obsessed with a mad delusion, the amoeba wanted to grow bigger and better, and so through painful eons it changed into that highly complex bundle of acute misery called man...
...When the earth-man was an amoeba, his life was a comparative cycle of bliss...
...I would like to call an inter-planetary conference...
...Moreover, in all seasons man races from place to place at terrific tempo, seeking, meanwhile, he knows not what...
...In each stage there was an accretion of contentment...
...the other half in devising humane methods to salvage the hungry and diseased survivors of his inhumanity...
...The address of the chief squid was hailed with joy, for even the squids were troubled by griefs that were no discoverable part of life-forms less complex...
...Let us no longer ev-olute, but devolute...
...We might be able to learn something from the people of worlds two billion years older than ours...
...So that he is forever ridden by the hags of discontent, which has led to ambition, and wars and murders, and a hundred dreadful neuroses for which scientists spend lifetimes in thinking up names...
...Half of his time is spent in contriving clever ways to blast and maim the soundest individuals of his race...
...Is rthere, swimming somewhere beyond the Milky Way, a happy planet which has solved our cosmic dilemma and which is perhaps populated by contented cows or chromosomes...
...And at what a cost, my brothers...
...Let us imagine that such was the case and that when living organisms on Planet X attained the complexity of a squid a halt was called, and a convention of squids was summoned to put a stop to that sort of thing...
...Certainly, a pessimist would take that view and point to the way we are using up coal and oil that should be conserved, the way we are turning fertile areas into dust bowls, and the way we are waging wars...
...On top of all that, man has developed the power of imagination, unknown in the lower 3pecies...
...All of his wants were satisfied by merely surrounding a morsel of food, which was plentiful...
...Man is a passenger on a rudderless ship scudding before a hurricane, taking idiotic pride in the speed of his craft which rockets him toward the reefs...
...Let us assume that there is such a paradise among the stars, let us call it Planet X, and let us inquire, as Sir James Jeans suggests, how it achieved tranquillity in a universe of tears...
...Yet even among the amoeba there was not entire bliss...
Vol. 8 • April 1944 • No. 16
