Stephen Fry - Mythos
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these days, the origin of the universe is explained by proposing a big bang, a single event that instantly brought into being all the matter from which everything and everyone are made. The ancient Greeks had a different idea. They said it all started not with a bang, but with chaos. Was chaos a God, a divine being, or simply a state of nothingness? Or was chaos just as we would use the word today? A kind of terrible mess, like a teenager's bedroom. Only worse think of chaos perhaps as a kind of grand cosmic yon, as in a yawning chasm or yawning void. Whether chaos brought life and substance out of nothing, or whether chaos yawned life up or dreamed it up or conjured it up in some other way, I don't know, I wasn't there, nor were you. And yet in a way we were. Because all the bits that make us were there, it is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was chaos, who with a massive heave or a great shrug or hiccup vomit or cough began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans, penicillin, and toadstools and toads, sea lions, seals, lions, human beings, and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits. Whatever the truth science today agrees that everything is destined to return to chaos. It calls this inevitable fate entropy part of the great cycle from chaos to order and back against the chaos. Your trousers began as a chaotic atoms that somehow coalesced into matter that ordered itself over eons into a living substance that slowly evolved into a common plant that was woven into your handsome stuff that she's is your lovely legs. In time, you will abandon your trousers. Not now, I hope, and they will rot down into landfill or be burnt. In either case, their matter will be at length set free to become part of the atmosphere of the planet, and when the sun explodes and takes every particle of this world with it, including the ingredients of your trousers, all of the constituent atoms will return to cold chaos. And what is true for your trousers is, of course, true for you.