Brilliance and kindness shine brightest when far from the comfortable centre. Even nature is more generative there too

by Charles Foster  BIO

Photo by Tommy Trenchard/Panos Pictures

is a writer and a fellow of Exeter College, University of Oxford. He is also a barrister, a part-time judge of the Crown Court, and a veterinary surgeon. His books include Being a Beast (2016), Being a Human (2021) and The Edges of the World (2026).

Edited byNigel Warburton

The cosmos is an edgy place. We are on the far edge of a rapidly expanding Universe, hurtling into nothing. Earth is now further away than it was when you began to read this sentence, from the place where, at the time of the Big Bang, everything started. We have to put it that way, but it is wrong. For at the moment of the Big Bang, neither space nor time existed. They were forged in the explosion.

Everything that has happened in space and time happened on the far fringes. The process of creation and innovation is delegated to the margins.

This sounds poetical. It is. But it is not just poetry. It’s a statement of the way things are and the way things happen in all domains, from evolutionary biology to religion.

They understood this well in the Middle Ages. The abode of the stars – the stellatum – marked the edge of the visible cosmos. Beyond this was the rotating Primum Mobile – the prime mover, whose motion powered everything else. The ultimate edge was the engine driving all Earthly action.

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Evolutionary innovation happens at the edge of genetic orthodoxy, at the edge of an established population, and typically at the edge of a landmass: hence the exuberant biological creativity seen on islands, where new challenges are faced and old inhibitions relaxed. Take the St Kilda archipelago, for instance, in the heaving green sea off the outer isles of Scotland. It once housed a community of embattled farmers and seabird hunters. They were all evacuated in 1930, leaving behind two species of mice, both unique to the islands. The St Kilda house mouse, whose life depended on its coalition with the humans, went extinct within a few years. But the St Kilda field mouse, uninhibited by house mice, cats and humans, blossomed and changed. It doubled in size and became an enthusiastic flesh-eater, prowling the beaches and headlands for dead birds. Edges were fecund on St Kilda – at least for field mice. They always are. Indeed nothing else is.

Sexual reproduction itself is another good example of the creativity of edginess. It involves organisms and their gametes crossing the boundaries of the organism, meeting in the no-man’s land of a fallopian tube, or water, or air, and producing there something different from either of the parents. Sex is a machine for generating novelty. The newly gestated organism bursts across the edge of its mother, becoming fully itself.

Our physiology has evolved to make the most of edges. The phenomenon even has a name: hormesis

Yet there is no security for this or any other organism. It and we are poised always on the cusp of existence, a breath and a heartbeat from annihilation. ‘They [meaning ‘we’] give birth and are astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more,’ declaimed Samuel Beckett’s Pozzo in Waiting for Godot (1953) – unnecessarily, for we all know it anyway. I suppose that the secret of happiness – or at least of keeping panic at bay – is to learn to bear, if not enjoy, the ontological vertigo of edge-dwelling.

If we’re edge-people, living in an edgy world, on the edge of death, we might expect our physiology to have evolved to make the most of edges. It has. The phenomenon even has a name: hormesis. Those Victorian schoolmasters who sang the praises of cold baths were right – up to a point. The right sort of stress is good for you. In one fairly typical study, there was a 29 per cent reduction in sickness-related absences from work in people who took up a regime of cold showers.

Stresslessness kills. Sofas are deadly.

The best and truest books, paintings, sculptures and symphonies by edge-people in an edge-world are likely to be celebrations, denunciations or expositions of edges. If they don’t deal with edges, they’re missing the point of it all.

Missing the point is easy. Since the Neolithic there has been an industry devoted to pretending that centres are what life is all about – an industry based, unsurprisingly, in the physical centres called cities. Before then, we were all more or less itinerant hunter-gatherers, wandering in small groups, occasionally coalescing in slightly bigger clans and more occasionally, in some ages and some places (such as Göbekli Tepe, the vast Neolithic temple complex in eastern Türkiye), having bigger, usually cultic, conglomerations. There was nothing then akin to the cities that sprang up in Mesopotamia, where, for the first time, humans could point to a single place and say: ‘That’s where I’m from.’

It’s impossible to exaggerate how big and how bad this change was. Our address had been ‘The Whole World, Scintillating With Potential And Mystery’; now it was ‘A Mud-Walled Pen,........

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