Prehistoric Times by Eric Chevillard, Alyson Waters Page B

do not wonder which way to turn at a crossroads and they are so sure of finding their way that they lay in a food supply in several places, on different levels, before bifurcating again, whence this interminable digression that allows me to describe them in their natural surroundings with all the rigor and honesty that one rightly expects from science.
    Myopia fuels curiosity. It is this myopia above all that the mole’s curiosity would like to break through. And our curiosity is likewise stimulated by the mysteries to which our confused spirit gives birth. In truth, everything is very simple and somewhat disappointing. Archaeology has confirmed that man in his historical fiction has always been what he is, except for a fewdetails; successive civilizations resemble each other so closely that it would be possible to recount History backward, beginning with today, starting at the end in order to travel back through the ages all the way to the most ancient known remains; and there too we would see a logical progression with effects and causes reversed: the chain of events would seem no less inexorable than the one on which we are dependent. With the same amazement we would measure the path traveled by men from the time of telephone and automobile cities who, little by little having rid themselves of these nuisances, demolished one neighborhood at a time to make room for the peaceful and remote countryside with its farming villages where the rooftops rested on swallows’ nests until some new advances came along, simplifying, simplifying, the walls’ heavy stones that were so difficult to extract from the earth having been cleverly replaced by partitions made of branches or cob, to arrive at long last at the comfort of our modern caves, while the military engineers managed over time to reduce significantly the range of our weapons thanks to a series of technical developments intended to make them less lethal: this escapade, sketched broadly here, would have been no more ridiculous than actual history. If our ancestors had prostrated themselves before a single God, we would have shattered that rudimentary idol in order to worship, forehead to the ground, our gods as numerous as the stars. It is movement that matters, evolution regardless of the slope; there is no design, no necessity, nothing justifies History such as we can reconstitute it. Life is stubborn, it wants to endure, but no one can give it a shape or a goal. It remains a principle without consequence, a pure, unusable energy; no matter how much I dig, what’s the point if my pick only strikes the skulls of these old, old ideas?

 
    A LL THE SAME , Professor Glatt had advised me not to let anyone come down and it was not my intention to disobey his orders. The idea of disappearing for a while in order to proceed under the proper conditions with the inventory of the nonindexed objects discovered on the Pales site was rather agreeable to me; as soon as I can escape the gaze of others, I blossom. But I absentmindedly forgot to close the door behind me, and a bunch of busybodies followed me down the steep steps that lead to the cellar where all those objects stored higgledy-piggledy are waiting to be labeled and catalogued. After which they will be distributed to various museums or entrusted to various laboratories for analysis or even exhibited here in the cave; two additional display cases will no doubt be necessary to house the collection. It is always dark in the cellar. The light switch is to your right, if you still believe in this miracle: first there appears a single lightbulb, filled to the neck with a syrupy, cloudy glow that empties slowly into the ceiling lamp’s globe (a fly falls in and drowns, poor thing) so that the darkness withdraws slightly without for all that admitting defeat, without breaking its circle of wolves and dangers; now you can make out more distinctly the many assorted crates lined up against the four walls of hollow cinder block that