The Humans by Matt Haig
Speculative fiction
The Humans took me for a ride from the first page until the last, and it's a ride I'll visit again and again.
Matt Haig quickly rose to the top of my favorite authors list, and he remains perched there next to Cormac McCarthy, Ursula Leguin, and Margaret Atwood, all masters of their crafts. The Humans is the 4th of Haig's books I've read, and I become more a fan with every new page.
The Humans tells the story of an extraterrestrial being inhabiting the cloned body of a not-so-kind human professor as he attempts to save Earth from certain destruction. I will not give away plot details, character details, spoilers, or other book-specific tidbits. Instead, here are a few quotes from the first half of the book that piqued my curiosity, invited philosophical musings, or that otherwise stuck out to me as particularly poignant or beautiful.
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On Earth, you see, you can't just move from one place to another place instantaneously. The technology isn't there yet. It is nowhere near there yet. No. On Earth you have to spend a lot of time traveling in between places, be it on roads or on rail tracks or in careers or relationships. (pg. 9)
Our interstellar traveler comes from a planet where the inhabitants have the breadth of physics available to them instantly. Time is rather meaningless for the immortal beings who can teleport and who are telepathic and telekinetic. To be stripped of these activities would be jarring, but this quote stuck out because of the reference to careers and relationships. We don’t often think about the career trajectory as a form of travel, though it is. The same with relationship development. To have been intrigued by philosophy only a few pages into the book let me know I was on the right track to a fulfilling read.
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This was, I would later realize, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside clothing. Bodies inside wrappers. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away. (pg. 13)
I’m environmentally focused, so I think about packaging a lot. Probably way more than a normal person should, but I disgress. Our traveler is unaccustomed to wearing clothes, but he notices the external packaging of all things. From foodstuffs, including those that come in their own Earth-growth packaging but when which are peeled and put into plastic, to plastic and synthetic clothing, to hiding emotions under incongruous facial expressions, some days it feels like humans at large would rather play with the box than the doll inside. The cosmetics industry alone is a testament to this reality.
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Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other people, who had failed in their choices and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers. (pg. 31)
I read, relatively recently, A Brief History of Time, and found myself contemplating the idea of free will. You know, as one does following deep thinking about astrophysics. I used to be in the Nietzschean thought camp and championed the idea of the eternal return, the idea that time is a flat circle, the idea that we are destined to live our lives exactly as they are for eternity, that “free will” is nothing more than a pre-determined set of neuronic firings that direct behaviors.
While I’m no longer in my nihilistic phase of life (hats off to my early 20s), I often think back on the purpose of life, whether there is one, and what a human is to do about it regardless. We humans have a deep need to be right, to conquer, to flourish, to carry our seeds into the future, whether by procreation or through our creative works. And now that I’m in my mid-30s and enjoying my go-get-em phase of life, I believe fully in the freedom we all have to control our lives if we’re willing to seize that freedom, radical as it may be.
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[M]adness is a question sometimes of time and sometimes of postcode. (pg. 32)
After finishing Barbara Taylor’s memoir and Patrick Radden Keefe’s book about the Sackler family, the question of madness keeps coming up for me. I take an anti-pathology approach to health and wellness and truly believe people can “cure” themselves of most ailments as long as they’re willing to do the hard work and make the lifestyle changes necessary to change their paths.
But to be cured is, of itself, an interesting concept here, because to be cured means one must have been ill, which is not always the case from an anti-pathology mindset. To be “cured” in this context is synonymous with being “normal,” or “fitting in.”
And I worry that there is far too much focus on fitting in rather than supporting one who wishes to stand out.
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People search for external values and meaning in a world which not only can't provide it but is indifferent to their quest. (pg. 41)
I won’t say much on this, but I’m not a religious person and believe in no god except the almighty mathematics holding up the entire universe. (I picture “God” as a tesseract, an energy capsule of sorts, powering all of creation. An unseeing, unfeeling, albeit beautiful cube, like the black cube of Saturn down this rabbit hole.) And if the universal creator is a gigantic Energizer bunny in the sky, there’s no reason any person can’t learn how to harness that energy and put it to good use.
There is no reason to search externally for happiness, to search externally to find yourself. Looking within and connecting with the universal energy is the one path.
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[I]f we are going to have religion at all, then a religion of mathematics seems ideal, because if God exists, then what is He but a mathematician? (pg. 60)
I think Matt Haig wrote this line just for me. I refuse to believe anything else.
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[H]umans are still at the point in their development where they see a strong difference between the mental and the physical within the same body. They have mental hospitals and body hospitals, as if one doesn't directly affect the other. And so, if they can't accept that a mind is directly responsible for the body of the same person, they are hardly likely to understand how a mind . . . can affect the body of someone else. (pg. 107)
I’m a person who believes fully in the terrain theory of disease, of the mind-body connection. As a former employee of a major health insurance company and after having sat through far too many executive meetings about the standards of care and treatment and understanding exactly where and how those standards are derived, I no longer have faith in modern medicine. To me, it simply makes no sense to develop a modern cure for a modern disease. Modernity is causing disease, so rewinding progress, going back to basics and back to nature, is the right path to wellness.
The idea that to understand the mind we must pretend it is separate from the body is fascinating, though macabre. The brain-gut connection is too often overlooked, as is the mouth-heart connection, and there are other missed connections as medicine itself becomes more specialized and, thus, more siloed. But the human body is a fully integrated and dependent system. Until humans are willing to accept this fundamental truth, we will never reach enlightenment as a species. We will never learn how powerful our minds truly are.
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If you're interested in reading this book, read it. There is no other way to experience it than sinking into the story and allowing it to envelop you.
If you’ve read this novel and saved similar quotes, I’d love to hear your takes. Similarly, I’d love for you to share other quotes from the book I didn’t offer here with your musings.
<3 Fal