The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

“Unhand me, grey-beard loon.”

In a clearing on the edge of the woods, a flying saucer stands on spindly legs among the still-smouldering vegetation. A door slides open, light spills out, and a green face with three eyes peers at the gaggle of fearful spectators below and asks them: “What is it like to be a human being?” This is also one of the main questions being asked in the themed section of this very issue.

You might protest that this is the one thing that you don’t need anybody to tell you. You’re the expert. After all, each and every one of us has first-hand experience of what it is like to be a human being. In some ways, possibly, it is the only thing of which we do have first-hand experience, since our experience of everything beyond ourselves comes to us through our bodies’ senses, filtered and neatly sorted and labelled by those senses and by what Immanuel Kant called the ‘categories of understanding’ in our minds. In any case, you yourself have fought in the muddy trenches of human life, whether literally in Ukraine or metaphorically in any corner of the world. You yourself could write an epic about human experience – and many have.