The Bengal Tiger and the Himalayan Yak

“I am more and more plagued by a single question,” said the yak from Nepal: “What is the meaning of it All?”

“I am sorry to hear that,” said the Bengal, “and sorry that you are not well.”

“Who said anything about being sick?”

“You did. I distinctly heard ‘plagued.'”

“It was just an expression, a figure of speech, a vague make-do word. You know.”

“Yes, I know. So—it just popped into your head, a sort of accident? Well, there are very few accidents in the ways of the mind. Everything is relevant. Furthermore, for your information, whenever somebody speaks in virtual capitals, saying ‘Life’ or, as you said, ‘All’, they are not empty locutions either but broad, urgent, fraught, and he is saying that he is already lost in some wide catch-all empyrean, an indefinable Every Place or No Place—actually annihilation—and probably for a long while already—gone, as they say. How far, we shall soon determine.”

“‘Gone?’ I’m insane?”

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.