Sometimes these responses troubled her, and she felt called upon to
correct his deficiencies in perspective and defend her race. But at
other times his naive and disbelieving comments cut frighteningly close
to the truth. He accepted and took for granted none of the vast
pretenses and self-important doctrines in which humanity clothed itself,
and was therefore able to see a larger picture, or certainly a different
one, than that which she was accustomed to.
For to him Man was not the only, or even the most important species on
the planet, let alone the center of the Universe, and sole concern of
the Nameless. It was perhaps for this reason that he had not been
shocked when Sylviana told him that the Earth revolved around the Sun,
and not the other way around, or that the stars were themselves suns,
parenting similar worlds of their own. To him Man was not the separate
creation of a God unhappy or impatient with Nature. To his mind, if she
understood him correctly, evolution was quite miraculous enough, and
brought him closer to, rather than farther from, believing in a
Universal being. And he assured her that nearly every animal was
capable of some measure of thought and feeling, as real and meaningful
to its existence, as the painful dreams and aspirations of men.
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