Chapter 2 - Infinitesimal Lives

Summary

“London. Four million forlorn hopes!” reads Thomas Hardy’s notebook entry for April 5, 1889. Two days later, still contemplating the despair amassed in what was then the world’s most populous city, Hardy wrote of the “woeful fact – that the human race is too extremely developed for its corporeal conditions, the nerves being evolved to an activity abnormal in such an environment.” The strain that London’s overdeveloped urban environment was clearly exerting on Hardy’s own nerves opens onto a wider lament on the misery of the “human race,” which must suffer collectively the biological burden of consciousness. “Even the higher animals are in excess in this respect,” he writes, expanding the already immense range of his speculations by questioning “whether Nature, or what we call Nature, so far back when she crossed the line from invertebrates to vertebrates, did not exceed her mission.” Hardy concludes, “This planet does not supply the materials for happiness to higher existences.