QUOTE : He closed his eyes and imagined himself looking back to the hairy and slobbery jungle lives of his first human ancestors, back to when language was still shut in behind bars of teeth. But that wasn’t where the lifestream began. He had to go further back, past the scurrying lemur lives and the slimy and raw slug lives, feeling back millions of years to the eyeless, mouthless beginnings of the cell. Instinctively, he knew that wasn’t the stream source either. To find the beginning, he had to dream back far beyond the steaming swamp-ferns, even further, past the burning seas, back to when the whole planet swelled vaster but less dense, back to the world as a hanging garden of gases and plasma: a phosphorescent cloud swirling in on itself, neither alive nor dead, turning slowly around the star that was dreaming it.