Not to be born at all is best, far best that can befall; next best, when born, with least delay, to trace the backward way. — Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus One occasionally hears the view that our world was a better place before humans evolved and will be so again when our species goes extinct … the sooner the better. That opening quotation from Sophocles dates from the fifth century BC, so it’s clearly an idea with some staying power. Few have expressed it more starkly than

The mines had long since gone to ash and silence. Their shafts yawned beneath the black hills like the mouths of forgotten beasts, breathing cold air that smelled of iron, sulphur and the moss of old graves from the lone prairie. Nothing grew there except scrub cedar and thorn, and the wind carried a dust so fine it found its way beneath doors, beneath skin, into the lungs where it settled forever. The man derided as Rocky Raccoon came out of those hills with one eye swollen

Whether the town had remained all those years precisely as he remembered it, or whether memory itself, having outlived the people who first entrusted it with such burdens, had patiently rebuilt the place from weather, longing and those few objects that refuse to surrender themselves even after names have begun to do so, he could never afterward determine; he knew only that somewhere in the north of Ontario there had been, and perhaps still was, a little settlement gathered be