"Existence demanding the thing it craved. Was that it, or existence finding light and learning to crave it? No matter—light, a thousand miracles of warmth and wonder! Growth was inevitable, Claire.
"Then the craving learned by experience broke into new form. I don't know what it was; a two-celled bug, perhaps—only that it was craving that did it. Hunger and thirst after light.
"Pain came at the very start of things. Wants unsatisfied drove with the scourge of hell, forcing eyes, ears, stomach, sex into being, and out of the squalor of it all, still goaded by incessant want, there heaved the gigantic scaly carcass of the dinosaur. Still unaware of things, but driven to move, to grow, to expand. Existence demanding more expression of its awareness of self.
"The beast didn't know what it was. He only grew and grew and grew, till he spread his ugly, yearning life over hundreds of feet of ground. Eye and ear and touch and a peace of filled belly lay basking in the light, glorying in what they found. Life was good, riotously good, finding things, finding itself out. They fought, fed, killed, bred, all in the effort of existence to know.
"What a blood-drenched chaotic struggle for self it was, Claire!
"And so, on and on and on. Touch didn't satisfy the incessant taste for more knowledge, more life. Bodies rising like hills out of the marshes couldn't give the keen joy that existence craved for itself.
"New things again: changed, altered products of the old, bearing in their frames the history, the memory of the old—it all came, and out of it at last, hunger-driven for more keen life, sprang a biped, hairy, tusked, savage, bloody, lustful, eager to live, live, live!
"He was a glorious beast. In his flattened head that held the little bloodshot eyes were memory, products of the past, things that harked back for confirmation of present things. He had instincts—that's what they are, instincts, memories of past sufferings—that whipped the organism to go on into keener living. He was sexed, he was hungry, he was vicious, he slept and ate, he bred consciously, carrying on the eager shout within his being for more, more of life. More of existence aware of itself!
"If he killed, he gloried in the hot blood that drenched his hairless nose, and he learned to laugh through the pleasure of a filled belly. He learned to cry when he went hungry. Tears came, and emotions, a more specialized instinct.
"He was learning something else, too. But pain still whipped him on, filled him with fear of non-life, and he grew cowardly. Nature had created a new thing, a brain, a specialized mass of cells that can comment, realize, criticise, warn, appreciate, choose better food, get it easier, help to conquer and promote life; the biped used this new thing to understand why he ran from the fingers that clutched at him in the dark and he became afraid. If it brought him new pain, it also brought him new pleasure. It was a great toy that could be used to enjoy oneself with.