Triggers

Epilogue

It’s an odd coincidence, the gestalt thinks, that here, at the end of November, if you start the day with sunrise in Washington, DC, the last place to see the dawn, twenty-four hours later, is a group of storied islands.

But odd coincidences abound in geography. For instance, those islands, out in the Pacific, happen to straddle the equator, and they are on the same meridian as the crater at Chicxulub, formed when an asteroid slammed into Earth sixty-five million years ago, triggering the worldwide climate change that killed the dinosaurs and paved the way for the ascent of mammals.

Finally, though, the archipelago Charles Darwin arrived at in 1835 is being kissed by the nascent day. Here now great tortoises—those from each island boasting a distinctive shell—are rousing from their sleep, their blood warming with the arrival of the sun. Here now the calls of finches—those from each island sporting a distinctive beak—herald the dawn. Here now black iguanas, the world’s only extant marine lizards, slip into a sea stained orange and pink by the rising daystar.

And here now all those who call the Galápagos home, as well as the visiting biologists and geologists and science-oriented tourists, join in, the last group to fuse with the collective. It is appropriate, judges the gestalt, that the place that taught the human race the most about evolution is the site of the completion of humanity’s transcendence into its next stage of existence.

Darwin’s closing words from The Origin of Species swirl through the collective consciousness:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The gestalt recasts the words ever so slightly: there is indeed grandeur in this view of life, with its combined power breathing now as one, and that, while this planet completes its most recent cycle according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning a new form most beautiful and most wonderful has now evolved.