Jeanette Winterson: The PowerBook

Sex. How did it start?

In the strange dark history of our evolution, there was a shift, inevitability, away from self-reproducing organisms -- like bacteria -- towards organisms which must fuse with one another to survive.

You see, bacteria know the secret of eternal life. They do not die unless something kills them. They don't change, they don't age, all they do is multiply.

Fusion allows complexity and diversity, but with it, we don't know why, hand in hand, came death in the first of her many disguises. Death disguised as life.

It was our only chance. We took it.

So those morbid medievals and those burning Romantic poets weren't wrong. Sex and death belong together, joined in our imaginations as they are in our DNA.

Sex and death are our original parents. For some of us, the only family we'll ever have.