Questions posed by Paul Gauguin (1897)

Where do we come from?  What are we?  Where are we going?


The Short Answer (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, 1979):

42


The Long Answer (title and author lost in the mists of time): *

It started 3,700 million years ago or so,
When chemicals were mixing in the sea.
They kept mixing and kept mingling, 'til they felt a little tingling,
And the tingling was the start of you and me.

Now the stuff called protoplasm in the early ocean's chasm
Was the first stuff on our planet that could feel.
And if what it felt was lonely, it's because it was the only
Stuff around that could continue, not congeal.

Yes that stuff, dumb and complacent, fed on everything adjacent,
'Til a lack of food forced it to rearrange.
And it learned to die a little so the rest could have some vittle.
Death was introduced so future life could change.

And with death came competitions, as life put forth new additions.
Protoplasm learned to mutate to survive.
With this constant rearranging, great improvement came from changing,
Making sure it was the fit who stayed alive.

And the Earth whirled outward spinning, outward from the first beginning,
Piling up millennia upon time's shore.
Little things grew and divided, through the murky deep they glided,
Each one slightly different from the one before.

Yet this process we're admiring counts on countless things expiring:
Systematized hideous mortality;
Brainless horrors swarming, breeding, tearing, chewing, gulping, feeding,
Brainless things who die so brainless things can be.

* From a letter read by Dr. Howl on "The Subgenius Show" broadcast by KPFA on April 7, 1990,
4:30-6:00 AM (my other inscrutable notes from this date: "Elmer Quigley?, The Pointed Buttercup")