The Turtle

The turtle lives on and on, years, decades, a century or more in prominent cases, but he is sad. He is clumsy and yet he can swim; doesn’t that cheer him sometime and lift his gloom in some favored seaway or lovely reef? No, he is always melancholy, everlastingly glum. What is so bad that he is so sad?

            

Is it his shell? the burden of his bone-house toted and carried, pulled and dragged wherever he goes, so that it’s a minor miracle he swims or rows at all, schlepping that inescapable surrounding weight all over the place, the bulk bearing down, brute force on his shoulders, heavier and heavier as he grows older. He labors under his leaden dome, feeling the increasing, encompassing freight. Oh yes, it’s his fortress against some attack, but how would you feel if you could never leave home? But: isn’t it buoyant, helping him float? So, it is also his life-saving durable coat, a principal reason that he thrives—and thrives. He may be immured but he endures—and endures and endures.

            

That’s it, it’s not the shell as shell. It’s existence and durance inside the cell. The shell is not the burden, but life itself is, the monotonous routine, repetitious sights, unvarying scenes. After the first hundred years nothing is as wondrous as first appeared—time and time again the tiresome tides, the flooding sea, the ebbing gulf—boring rhythms no sane turtle abides without turning morose.

            

No excitement can relieve the sheer repetition of even disasters and calamities—another eruption on the ocean floor, another duel between marine animals, a beaching of whales that have lost their direction again and again; another iceberg sloughing off a cliff sending it into the lashing main, one more giant island set adrift; another melting, another freeze; another upheaval or huge retrieval—enormities as boring as peace.

            

Do I make himself clear? He craves release. He is sad from over-long exposure. His mournful eye and stern composure say: life’s gift has become this curse I bear.

            

Moral: Above these waters on the land scientists work ceaselessly to extend human life. Woe to woman. Woe to man.