Nightwish "The Greatest Show on Earth" Слова пісні

The Greatest Show on Earth

[1. Four Point Six]

Archaean horizonThe first sunriseOn a pristine geaOpus perfectumSomewhere there, us sleeping

‘After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?’

[2. Life]

The cosmic law of gravityPulled the newborns around a fireA careless cold infinityIn every vast directionLonely farer in the Goldilocks zoneShe has a tale to tellFrom the stellar nursery into a carbon feastEnter LUCA

The tapestry of chemistryThere's a writing in the gardenLeading us to the mother of all

We are oneWe are a universeForebears of what will beScions of the Devonian seaAeons pass writing the tale of us allA day-to-day new openingFor the greatest show on Earth

Ion channels welcoming the outside worldto the stuff of starsBeading the tree of a biological holyEnter life

We are here to care for the gardenThe wonder of birthOf every form most beautiful

[3. The Toolmaker]

After a billion yearsThe show is still hereNot a single one of your fathers died youngThe handy travellersOut of AfricaLittle Lucy on the Afar

Gave birth to fantasyTo idolatryTo self-destructive weaponryEnter the God of gapsDeep within the pastAtavistic dread of the hunted

Enter Ionia, the cradle of thoughtThe architecture of understandingThe human lust to feel so exceptionalTo rule the Earth

Hunger for shiny rocksFor giant mushroom cloudsThe will to do just as you'd be done byEnter history, the grand finaleEnter ratkind

Man, he took his time in the sunHad a dream to understandA single grain of sandHe gave birth to poetryBut one day’ll cease to beGreet the last light of the library

We were here!We were here!We were here!We were here!

[4. The Understanding]

‘We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of those stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?’

[5. Sea-Worn Driftwood]

‘There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’