Yesterday's tour of the British Library was a walk through the progression of human consciousness and creativity, a reminder that every thing you know and do now is directly because someone before you took time away from TiVo and video games to think a lot about something, like politics or wine. Before you could get to movies, someone needed to think their way to a lens. Before they could get to a lens, someone had to think about glass. Each person was a rung in a ladder that rises directly to our life now. I am not one of these people. One thousand years ago, I would have sat around, drank ale, talked about an idea I had about a dragon, woke up hungover, drank more ale, all the while letting someone else write Beowulf. The only thing I would have contributed to human advancement would have been a drunken cave drawing. Thankfully, other past humans had more discipline and focus, and took time away from their recreation to record their thoughts. A bunch of barons sat around one weekend with King John to write the original Magna Carta charter, eventually leading to the idea of democracy. Someone hopped on a wooden boat to sail down the newly discovered American coastline, sketching a map as they did. Gutenberg arranged some metal casts together to print a Bible, Handel drew notes on some sheet music, Sylvia Plath wrote a letter to her publisher, Paul McCartney wrote lyrics on the back of an envelope. Granted, they did this at a time when there were fewer distractions - I wonder if Handel would have gotten into music if Facebook existed when he was first starting out. It was also more important. Without mp3s, live music was the only way to take something in. If you wanted to know what Africa looked like, all you had was someone's illustration. There was less content, so the content that existed had more value. But this is just to make me feel better about my laziness. Suffice to say, if time travel is ever created, and we wanted to catch a man from the past up to where humanity stands at the present, he need only go to the British Library.
As I stood in awe in front of these artifacts, I became cognizant of a pressure inside of me. Not a metaphorical pressure, but a physical one: a sulfurous gas surged inside my belly, quickly roaring through my colon like a car racing towards an exit. I was standing alone at the time, but to prepare for the forthcoming release, I turned my body around, so that my ass was facing a display case that could muffle the sound of the fart, rather than sending it forth into the center of the room, where the mass of people lay and might hear. As the air pushed forth, happy with its newfound freedom, penetrating the glass case in front of it, I breathed a sigh of relief. Close call, but I emerged unscathed. I waited a beat, then turned back around to the display case to continue my tour. It was only then I realized that I had just farted on the original 1859 release of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. I degraded one of the greatest creations of human thought with my bodily releases, in one act confirming that man is, in fact, related to animals. Surrounded by the greatest collection of human thought in the world, the best my body can do in appreciation is fart, like a chimpanzee who just got down eating a load of cabbage.
I'd like to offer a sincere apology to Charles Darwin and Lewis Carroll, whose Alice in Wonderland first draft was nearby. Do not take my fart to be in any way representative of my appreciation of your contributions. I am glad that, unlike me, you are capable of adding more to human progress than farts and boogers.