Primeval era

The Primeval era is the imagined watery past to which Naoki Higashida longs to return: a world before human beings, civilization, and lives ruled by time. In this image, water becomes a place of quiet and freedom, while the present-day difficulties he associates with autism acquire a speculative history. The idea does not offer a diagnosis; it gives form to a felt contrast between a body and mind out of step with ordinary time and a more contented existence beyond it.

The Distant Past as an Imagined Origin

Higashida pictures a time before people existed, when aquatic life-forms emerged and evolved. He wonders why they had to leave the water for dry land and become human beings whose lives are ruled by time. The question turns evolution into a personal mystery: the familiar human world appears not as an unquestioned destination, but as a departure from a quieter form of existence.

This is not presented as established history. In his broader account of autism, Higashida calls the idea his own made-up theory. He imagines people with autism as born outside the regime of civilization and as travellers from the distant past. The language offers a story of difference and belonging rather than a scientific account of origins.

Water and the Experience of Time

Water gives the imagined past its emotional and sensory force. Higashida describes it as quiet, freeing, and free from other people’s harassment; there, a person can stay still or swim and feel at one with time’s pulse. He contrasts that calm with the stimulation of the world outside water, especially what reaches the eyes and ears, where it is difficult to guess the duration of either a second or an hour.

That contrast connects the Primeval era to his description of time as hard to grasp. Time has no clear boundaries, and clock hands can show that it has passed without making its passage something that can be felt. In his account, one second can seem infinitely long while twenty-four hours rush by in a flash; visual scenes, rather than a continuous timeline, fix time in memory. The watery past therefore imagines relief not simply from clocks, but from the unease of inhabiting a flow that cannot reliably be measured or anticipated.

Freedom, Expression, and Civilization

The imagined return is also a response to constraint. Higashida says people with autism have little freedom because they are a different kind of human, born with primeval senses: outside the normal flow of time, unable to express themselves, and carried through life by their bodies. The passage gathers temporal dislocation, communicative difficulty, and bodily experience into one account of being out of step with the present.

His description of autism as arising outside civilization extends that reversal. He speculates that humanity’s killings and destruction of the planet have created a deep crisis, and imagines autism as somehow emerging from it. People with autism may look physically like others while being, in his metaphor, travellers from a much earlier world. Their difference is thus not framed only as distance from a norm: it may also carry a quiet value, if their presence helps people remember what truly matters for Earth.

The Idea’s Limits and Significance

The book’s framing asks readers to take Higashida’s testimony seriously without treating every generalization as a universal fact. His reflections are an individual account; he acknowledges elsewhere that autistic people differ, and the translator emphasizes that Higashida wrote his answers at thirteen and is not a guru. His claim that all autistic people feel the same about the pull of the past is therefore best read as part of his imaginative argument, not as proof that every autistic person shares the experience.

Within that argument, the Primeval era makes inner difficulty legible through a striking reversal: what can look like failure to keep pace with ordinary life becomes a sign of belonging to another temporal world. Water offers a counter-image to overstimulation and uncertainty; the distant past gives a shape to the wish for freedom and expression. The idea’s significance lies in this imaginative reframing, and in its invitation to listen to an autistic writer describing a world that others may otherwise mistake.