In `The Beginning'

My 5-year-old has reached not the Age of Reason but the Age of Philosophy. In my experience, that’s when thoughtful children start asking fundamental questions about existence, the ones adults tend to ignore or comfortably assume they answered long ago. Michael is fixed on the Big Bang and the Heraclitean notion that the universe is flux, not stasis. He accepts plate tectonics. He accepts evolution by natural selection as an elegantly simple explanation for the multiplicity of life forms inhabiting the Earth. At this rate, I expect him to become an ideal reader not only of Heraclitus and Darwin but also Ovid.

For now, we are reading The Beginning, by Peter Ackroyd – yes, that Peter Ackroyd, the one who has given us biographies of T.S. Eliot, Dickens, Thomas More, Blake, Chaucer and, most recently, Shakespeare. We might think of The Beginning as a biography of the universe, starting some 14 billion years ago with nothingness turning into “somethingness” in a nanosecond. The book’s opening sentences inevitably echo “Genesis”: “The Earth came out of fire,” Ackroyd writes. “The Earth was fire. The fire still burns at the center of our world, to remind us of the beginning….”

Heraclitus (as translated by Guy Davenport) wrote: “Everything becomes fire, and from fire everything is born, as in the eternal exchange of money and merchandise.”

That the man who wrote a splendid, level-headed life of Shakespeare can also produce a life of the universe aimed at young people (without insulting adults) stirs admiration and envy in this writer (and parent). Ackroyd’s language is never jargon-ridden; neither is it sappily anthropomorphic. My son and I have only reached the Devonian period (vertebrates move onto land, the Age of Fishes), and there’s no suggestion that this unimaginably alien and distant world is somehow mere prelude to the true crown of creation, Homo sapiens. The book inspires humility and wonder, and Michael is forever nagging me to read a few more pages.