“
Mythologically speaking, if there's anything I hate worse than trios of old ladies, it's bulls. Last summer, I fought the Minotaur on top of Half-Blood Hill. This time what I saw up there was even worse: two bulls. And not just regular bulls - bronze ones the size of elephants. And even that wasn't bad enough. Naturally they had to breathe fire, too.
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #2))
“
Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant;
the only harmless great thing.
”
”
John Donne
“
Never, oh! never, nothing will die;
The stream flows,
The wind blows,
The cloud fleets,
The heart beats,
Nothing will die.
”
”
Alfred Tennyson
“
Not natural, in my view, sah. Not in favor of unnatural things.'
Vetinari looked perplexed. 'You mean, you eat your meat raw and sleep in a tree?
”
”
Terry Pratchett (The Fifth Elephant (Discworld, #24; City Watch, #5))
“
Secrets are like plants. They can stay buried deep in the earth for a long time, but eventually they'll send up shoots and give themselves away. They have to. It's their nature. Just a tiny green stem at first. Which slowly, insidiously grows taller, stronger, unfolding itself, until there it is. A big fat secret, right in front of your face; a fully bloomed flower perfumed with the scent of deception.
”
”
Judy Reene Singer (Still Life With Elephant)
“
Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.
”
”
Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death)
“
We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.
”
”
Richard P. Feynman (What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character)
“
It is in the nature of the universe that the person who always keeps you waiting ten minutes will, on the day you are ten minutes tardy, have been ready ten minutes early and will make a point of not mentioning this.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (The Fifth Elephant (Discworld, #24))
“
How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.
”
”
David Hume (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion)
“
Nature is the domain of liberty,’ Humboldt said, because nature’s balance was created by diversity which might in turn be taken as a blueprint for political and moral truth. Everything, from the most unassuming moss or insect to elephants or towering oak trees, had its role, and together they made the whole. Humankind was just one small part. Nature itself was a republic of freedom.
”
”
Andrea Wulf (The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World)
“
My heart can feel like an elephant who is feeling dread and has an exceptional memory and naturally possesses something valuable that might be hunted, poached, wasted.
”
”
Jenny Slate (Little Weirds)
“
Elephant, beyond the fact that their size and conformation are aesthetically more suited to the treading of this earth than our angular informity, have an average intelligence comparable to our own. Of course they are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves -- nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin's lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it. This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets -- and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other.
”
”
Beryl Markham (West with the Night)
“
Wildlife, we are constantly told, would run loose across our towns and cities were it not for the sport hunters to control their population, as birds would blanket the skies without the culling services of Ducks Unlimited and other groups. Yet here they are breeding wild animals, year after year replenishing the stock, all for the sole purpose of selling and killing them, deer and bears and elephants so many products being readied for the market. Animals such as deer, we are told, have no predators in many areas, and therefore need systematic culling. Yet when attempts are made to reintroduce natural predators such as wolves and coyotes into these very areas, sport hunters themselves are the first to resist it. Weaker animals in the wild, we hear, will only die miserable deaths by starvation and exposure without sport hunters to control their population. Yet it's the bigger, stronger animals they're killing and wounding--the very opposite of natural selection--often with bows and pistols that only compound and prolong the victim's suffering.
”
”
Matthew Scully (Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy)
“
The fundamental defect of the female character is a lack of a sense of justice. This originates first and foremost in their want of rationality and capacity for reflexion but it is strengthened by the fact that, as the weaker sex, they are driven to rely not on force but on cunning: hence their instinctive subtlety and their ineradicable tendency to tell lies: for, as nature has equipped the lion with claws and teeth, the elephant with tusks, the wild boar with fangs, the bull with horns and the cuttlefish with ink, so it has equipped woman with the power of dissimulation as her means of attack and defence, and has transformed into this gift all the strength it has bestowed on man in the form of physical strength and the power of reasoning. Dissimulation is thus inborn in her and consequently to be found in the stupid woman almost as often as in the clever one. To make use of it at every opportunity is as natural to her as it is for an animal to employ its means of defence whenever it is attacked, and when she does so she feels that to some extent she is only exercising her rights. A completely truthful woman who does not practice dissimulation is perhaps an impossibility, which is why women see through the dissimulation of others so easily it is inadvisable to attempt it with them. – But this fundamental defect which I have said they possess, together with all that is associated with it, gives rise to falsity, unfaithfulness, treachery, ingratitude, etc. Women are guilty of perjury far more often than men. It is questionable whether they ought to be allowed to take an oath at all.
”
”
Arthur Schopenhauer (Über die Weiber)
“
If you do not have a memory like an elephant, leave impressions like one.
”
”
null
“
If the world can no longer afford the luxury of natural beauty, then it will soon be overcome and destroyed by its own ugliness.
”
”
Romain Gary
“
animals are indeed more ancient, more complex and in many ways more sophisticated than us. They are more perfect because they remain within Nature's fearful symmetry just as Nature intended. They should be respected and revered, but perhaps none more so than the elephant, the world's most emotionally human land mammal.
”
”
Daphne Sheldrick
“
He says that woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth. That wind blows in her ears and trees whisper to her. That the dead sing through her mouth and the cries of infants are clear to her. But for him this dialogue is over. He says he is not part of this world, that he was set on this world as a stranger. He sets himself apart from woman and nature.
And so it is Goldilocks who goes to the home of the three bears, Little Red Riding Hood who converses with the wolf, Dorothy who befriends a lion, Snow White who talks to the birds, Cinderella with mice as her allies, the Mermaid who is half fish, Thumbelina courted by a mole. (And when we hear in the Navaho chant of the mountain that a grown man sits and smokes with bears and follows directions given to him by squirrels, we are surprised. We had thought only little girls spoke with animals.)
We are the bird's eggs. Bird's eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep; we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and sprigs of wallflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak.
But we hear.
”
”
Susan Griffin (Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her)
“
The elephant goad represents Yama, the god of death and bondage. Ganesha thus acknowledges the life-giving aspect of nature as well as the life-taking aspect of nature.
”
”
Devdutt Pattanaik (Seven secrets of Shiva)
“
Trans women are juvenile elephants. We are much stronger and more powerful than we understand. We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma, armed with ivory spears and faces unique in nature, living in grasslands where any of the ubiquitous humans may or may not be a poacher. With our strength, we can destroy each other with ease. But we are a lost generation. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain. No matriarchs to tell the young girls to knock it off or show off their own long lives lived happily and well.
”
”
Torrey Peters (Detransition, Baby)
“
Wherever you are, with whatever means you have, if you reclaim a piece of land for nature, your world will grow kinder, more benevolent. Create havens - for animals, for other people, for yourself - and let this reflect into the world. Fight for space in your own backyard, in an acre or a flowerpot or simply an embrace of the longing for company that lingers in your wilting heart. If you take this one step toward them, no matter where you are, the elephants will come to you.
”
”
Boyd Varty (Cathedral of the Wild: An African Journey Home)
“
Servants ran to wake the young king, Tamar, already awake and watching from his balcony. Curious, naturally. Not altogether pleased. No more than anyone would be, jolted out of a sound sleep by unexpected elephants.
”
”
Lloyd Alexander (The Iron Ring)
“
They say things are determined by genetics, by parenting, by heredity, by climate, by diet, by geography, by time spent in the womb, by nature, by nurture. They fail to hear the elephant in the room, trumpeting away: history.
”
”
Julian Barnes (Elizabeth Finch)
“
For centuries poets, some poets, have tried to give a voice to the animals, and readers, some readers, have felt empathy and sorrow. If animals did have voices, and they could speak with the tongues of angels--at the very least with the tongues of angels--they would be unable to save themselves from us. What good would language do? Their mysterious otherness has not saved them, nor have their beautiful songs and coats and skins and shells and eyes. We discover the remarkable intelligence of the whale, the wolf, the elephant--it does not save them, nor does our awareness of the complexity of their lives. Their strength, their skills, their swiftness, the beauty of their flights. It matters not, it seems, whether they are large or small, proud or shy, docile or fierce, wild or domesticated, whether they nurse their young or brood patiently on eggs. If they eat meat, we decry their viciousness; if they eat grasses and seeds, we dismiss them as weak. There is not one of them, not even the songbird who cannot, who does not, conflict with man and his perceived needs and desires. St. Francis converted the wolf of Gubbio to reason, but he performed this miracle only once and as miracles go, it didn’t seem to capture the public’s fancy. Humans don’t want animals to reason with them. It would be a disturbing, unnerving, diminishing experience; it would bring about all manner of awkwardness and guilt.
”
”
Joy Williams (Ill Nature)
“
Remember, the moon is reflected in one drop of water as it is the entire ocean-so it is with God. He is reflected in each living thing-in a grain of sand as the entire shore, one star as the whole universe. Each animal as in all creatures.
”
”
Ralph Helfer (Modoc: The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived)
“
A bee, though small, can still sting you; an elephant, though calm, can still trample you; a lion, though full, can still devour you.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
In the whole vast domain of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom. As soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom, you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die, and how many are killed. But from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A power of violence at once hidden and palpable … has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others. Thus there are insects of prey, reptiles of prey, birds of prey, fishes of prey, quadrupeds of prey. There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food and he kills to clothe himself. He kills to adorn himself, he kills in order to attack, and he kills in order to defend himself. He kills to instruct himself and he kills to amuse himself. He kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him.
From the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound ... from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child - his table is covered with corpses ... And who in all of this will exterminate him who exterminates all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man ... So it is accomplished ... the first law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.
”
”
Joseph de Maistre (St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence)
“
Onyx is angry," Damian says. "Onyx has a right to be angry. You've got to remember, for many elephants, their life is that of a human in a war-torn country. Ravaged homes, killed relatives, separation," Damian says. Here's another thing I've learned over two months--every elephants here has a sad story. Every captive elephant's story is one of loss and separation. Something to remember every time you see happy people getting elephant rides.
”
”
Deb Caletti (The Nature of Jade)
“
PTSD seems to have an even higher prevalence and greater severity following violence or disaster that is man-made; natural disasters, "acts of God," seem somehow easier to accept. (...). This is the case with acute stress reactions, too: I see it often with my patients in hospital, who can show extraordinary courage and calmness in facing the most dreadful diseases but fly into a rage if a nurse is late with a bedpan or a medication. The amorality of nature is accepted, whether it takes the form of a monsoon, an elephant in musth, or a disease; but being subjected helplessly to the will of others is not, for human behavior always carries (or is felt to carry) a moral charge.
”
”
Oliver Sacks (Hallucinations)
“
Social” justice…but why only “social”…why set your sights so low…you mean just the opinions of the many? Who cares. Here is my vision of the true justice, the justice of nature: the zoos opened, predators unleashed by the dozens, hundreds….four thousand hungry wolves rampaging on streets of these hive cities, elephants and bison stampeding, the buildings smashed to pieces, the cries of the human bug shearing through the streets as the lord of beasts returns.
”
”
Bronze Age Pervert (Bronze Age Mindset)
“
Voltaire responded that, on the contrary, vivisection showed that the dog has the same organes de sentiment that a human has. "Answer me, you who believes that animals are only machines," he wrote. "Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?
”
”
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals)
“
If the shrike did not eat the grasshoppers, then the grasshoppers would eat all the grass, and there would be none left for the deer...and the deer are food for the tiger. Life in the jungle is a giant spiderweb; if you touch one strand, it will vibrate at the other end. We cannot separate nature into good and bad, Rita. The gods do not will it so.
”
”
Eric Dinerstein (What Elephants Know (Nandu #1))
“
It is the ant, not the lion, which the elephant fears.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
Malta has a rich and varied faunal history, including dwarf elephants and hippos, and a giant, flightless swan that stood taller than the island’s pachyderms.
”
”
Tim Flannery (Europe: A Natural History)
“
Every wild thing is in tune with its surroundings, awake to its fate and in absolute harmony with the planet. Their attention is focused totally outwards. Humans, on the other hand, tend to focus introspectively on their own lives too often, brooding and magnifying problems that the animal kingdom would not waste a millisecond of energy upon. To most people, the magnificent order of the natural world where life and death actually mean something has become unrecognizable.
”
”
Lawrence Anthony (The Elephant Whisperer)
“
I mean, here we are in LA. The home of celebrities. They’re the local natural phenomenon. Everyone knows you come to LA to see the celebrities, like you go to Sri Lanka to see the elephants.
”
”
Sophie Kinsella (Shopaholic to the Stars (Shopaholic, #7))
“
Those of us who are in tune with nature and animals know it is our way of life, Bram. There is a connection to all living things, a vibration of Life. Animals were not given a power of choice. A lion does not try and eat legumes, nor an elephant meat. We believe the best way to communicate with nature, God, is through a liaison: the animals..... Nature hears one voice and obeys it. That is why ten or ten thousand birds may rise from the surface of a lake at the same time and yet never touch one another. Man only hears his own voice. He constantly bumps into another. Even his voice mirrors his erratic walk, jealousy, hate, ego, pride, lying, cheating. He makes his own judgements and falls prey to his greed. Remember, the moon is reflected on one drop of water as is the entire ocean-- so it is with God. He is reflected ins each living thing-- in a grain of sand as the entire shore, one star as the whole universe. Each animal as in all creatures. -Jagrat
”
”
Ralph Helfer (Modoc: The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived)
“
In dreams there are only half-discoveries. In dreams we expect to be tricked and are constantly jumpy, awaiting the strange twist or the inevitable fall. In the event of the latter, even a peaceful death is denied us, and we are awake, sweaty and eyeballs still moving. As we spend the first waking moments trying desperately to remember our dream lives or wondering if a death in dreams provokes our real deaths, everything is soon forgotten and we move and live in the natural world.
”
”
Angelo R. Lacuesta (White Elephants: Stories)
“
The absence of adult males upsets the natural order in our species and in others. For example, game wardens in South Africa recently had to kill several teenage male elephants that had uncharacteristically become violent. These young elephants behaved like a contemporary street gang—and perhaps for the same reason: There were no adult males in their lives. To solve the problem, park officials imported adult male elephants from outside the area. Almost immediately, the remaining juveniles stopped misbehaving. Testosterone ungoverned by experience is dangerous, and older males temper the craving for dominance—merely by being dominant themselves.
”
”
Gavin de Becker (Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe (and Parents Sane))
“
Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs,
tossing grass up to heaven—as a distraction, not a prayer.
That’s not humility you see on our long final journeys
it’s procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down.
— Dan Chiasson, from “The Elephant,” Natural History. (Knopf; First edition. edition October 11, 2005)
”
”
Dan Chiasson
“
He says that woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth. That wind blows in her ears and trees whisper to her. That the dead sing through her mouth and the cries of infants are clear to her. But for him this dialogue is over. He says he is not part of this world, that he was set on this world as a stranger. He sets himself apart from woman and nature ...
We are the birds eggs. Birds eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep; we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and sprigs of wallflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak.
But we hear.
”
”
Susan Griffin (Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her)
“
To live with his physical hideousness, incapacitating deformities and unremiting pain is trial enough, but to be exposed to the cruelly lacerating expressions of horror and disgust by all who behold him -- is even more difficult to bear. [...] For in order to survive, Merrick forces himself to suffer these humiliations, I repeat, humiliations, in order to survive, thus he exposes himself to crowds who pay to gape and yawp at this freak of nature, the Elephant Man.
”
”
Bernard Pomerance (The Elephant Man)
“
They died... Have you ever seen a baby elephant lying on its side, with its trunk inert, gazing at you with eyes in which there seem to have taken refuge all those so highly praised human qualities of which humanity is so largely devoid?
”
”
Romain Gary (The Roots of Heaven)
“
The amorality of nature is accepted, whether it takes the form of a monsoon, an elephant in musth, or a disease; but being subjected helplessly to the will of others is not, for human behavior always carries (or is felt to carry) a moral charge.
”
”
Oliver Sacks (Hallucinations)
“
The amorality of nature is accepted whether it takes the form of a monsoon, an elephant is musth, or a disease; but being subjected helplessly to the will of others is not, for human behaviour always carries (or is felt to carry) a moral charge.
”
”
Oliver Sacks (Hallucinations)
“
When man chooses to develop his innate power of communication with nature and therefore hear the voice, all will be right with the world – we will be as one. What you have been able to do with your Modoc is what man has been seeking for a long time. To communicate with nature through animals.
”
”
Ralph Helfer (Modoc: The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived)
“
Left to their own devices, human bodies rot, decompose, come apart, and sink gloriously back into the earth from whence they came. Using embalming and heavy protective caskets to stop this process is a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable, and demonstrates our clear terror of decomposition. The death industry markets caskets and embalming under the rubric of helping bodies look “natural,” but our current death customs are as natural as training majestic creatures like bears and elephants to dance in cute little outfits, or erecting replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Venetian canals in the middle of the harsh American desert.
”
”
Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory)
“
All power on Earth was built around what it could exploit. It leveraged, burned, absorbed. stored, and monetized every ounce of what the natural world could produce. Even solar power tapped the one sun in the sky, all systems and studies based on the measurements of monetization. One way, one sun. And we were all blinded.
”
”
Cebo Campbell (Sky Full of Elephants)
“
They say that it is one of the most terrifying manifestations in nature: a bull elephant in a state of must. Twin streams of vile-smelling liquid flow from the ducts of the temples and into the corners of the jaws. At these times the great beast will gore giraffes and hippos, will break the backs of cringeing rhinoceri. This was male-elephantine heat. Must: it derived via Urdu from the Persian mast or maest—“intoxicated.” But I had settled for the modal verb. I must, I must, I just must.
”
”
Martin Amis (The Zone of Interest: A novel)
“
Where I see real evil is in the witch burners. The righteous do-gooders. The Rick Santorums. Those are the people who scare me. And the people who hurt animals, the rich boys who fly to Africa to bag a cheetah or cut the tail off an elephant. Their lack of respect for the life around them I find disgusting. The most evil things are always at war with nature.
”
”
Suzan Saxman (The Reluctant Psychic)
“
The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?
”
”
David Attenborough
“
If I’d wanted to do just an adequate job, I could have done only so much and no more; if I wanted to do it right, I could do it right. But just because I’d get down to details didn’t necessarily mean my labors were always appreciated. Some folks would call it tedious nit-picking. Still, as I said before, I’m one for doing my best. It’s just my nature. And even more, it’s a matter of pride.
”
”
Haruki Murakami (The Elephant Vanishes)
“
The elephant is the largest, but not the fiercest. The giraffe is the tallest, but not the strongest. The cheetah is the fastest, but not the wisest. The ant is the smallest, but not the gentlest.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
Yes,” says Lena, in her way. “Some people have to practice forgiveness and will never be naturals. They’ll either do the work and get awesome at it but always have to think it over—or never do the work and die with a sack of hurts the size of an elephant. I know, because I’m in danger of being one of those people whenever I stop paying attention.” Then she nods at me. “Some people, like your mother, forgive so naturally they don’t notice it happening. They’ll get hurt twice as often because they are so quick to forgive but feel it half as much because of their ability to let things go.
”
”
Kelly Harms (The Overdue Life of Amy Byler)
“
Do you think forgiveness is a skill learned through practice, like playing chess, or a talent given to you at birth, like singing in tune?” “Yes,” says Lena, in her way. “Some people have to practice forgiveness and will never be naturals. They’ll either do the work and get awesome at it but always have to think it over—or never do the work and die with a sack of hurts the size of an elephant.
”
”
Kelly Harms (The Overdue Life of Amy Byler)
“
When an animal dies, another of the same species may cling to the body, eat the body, or look bored. Bees expel dead bodies from the hive or, if that is impossible, embalm them in honey. Elephants "say" a ritualistic good-bye, and touch their dead before slowly walking away. Corvids often accept the death of a companion without much fuss, but they at times have “funerals,” where scores of birds lament over the corpse of a deceased crow.
But it is a bit odd that people should investigate whether animals “comprehend death,” as if human beings understood what it means to die. Is death a prelude to reincarnation? A portal to Heaven or Hell? Complete extinction? Union with all life? Or something else? All of these views can at times be comforting, yet people usually fear death, quite regardless of what they claim to believe.
In the natural world, killing seems a casual affair. Human beings, of course, kill on a massive scale, but most of us can only kill, if at all, by softening the impact of the deed through rituals such as drink or prayer. The strike of a spider, a heron, or a cat is swift and, seemingly, without inhibition or remorse. They pounce with a confidence that could indicate ignorance, indifference, or else profound knowledge. Could this be, perhaps, because animals cannot conceive of killing, since they are not aware of death? Could it be because they understand death well, far better than do human beings?
If animals envision the world not in terms of abstract concepts but sensuous images, the soul might appear as a unique scent, a rhythmic motion, or a tone of voice. Death would be the absence of these, though without that absolute finality that we find so severe. Perhaps the heron that snaps a fish thinks his meal lives on, as he one day will, in the form of currents in the pond.
”
”
Boria Sax (The Raven and the Sun: Poems and Stories)
“
These ideas can be made more concrete with a parable, which I borrow from John Fowles’s wonderful novel, The Magus.
Conchis, the principle character in the novel, finds himself Mayor of his home
town in Greece when the Nazi occupation begins. One day, three Communist
partisans who recently killed some German soldiers are caught. The Nazi commandant gives Conchis, as Mayor, a choice — either Conchis will execute the three partisans himself to set an example of loyalty to the new regime, or the Nazis will execute every male in the town.
Should Conchis act as a collaborator with the Nazis and take on himself the
direct guilt of killing three men? Or should he refuse and, by default, be responsible for the killing of over 300 men?
I often use this moral riddle to determine the degree to which people are hypnotized by Ideology. The totally hypnotized, of course, have an answer at once; they know beyond doubt what is correct, because they have memorized the Rule Book. It doesn’t matter whose Rule Book they rely on — Ayn Rand’s or Joan Baez’s or the Pope’s or Lenin’s or Elephant Doody Comix — the hypnosis is indicated by lack of pause for thought, feeling and evaluation. The response is immediate because it is because mechanical. Those who are not totally hypnotized—those who have some awareness of concrete events of sensory space-time, outside their heads— find the problem terrible and terrifying and admit they don’t know any 'correct' answer.
I don’t know the 'correct' answer either, and I doubt that there is one. The
universe may not contain 'right' and 'wrong' answers to everything just because Ideologists want to have 'right' and 'wrong' answers in all cases, anymore than it provides hot and cold running water before humans start tinkering with it. I feel sure that, for those awakened from hypnosis, every hour of every day presents choices that are just as puzzling (although fortunately not as monstrous) as this parable. That is why it appears a terrible burden to be aware of who you are, where you are, and what is going on around you, and why most people would prefer to retreat into Ideology, abstraction, myth and self-hypnosis.
To come out of our heads, then, also means to come to our senses, literally—to live with awareness of the bottle of beer on the table and the bleeding body in the street. Without polemic intent, I think this involves waking from hypnosis in a very literal sense. Only one individual can do it at a time, and nobody else can do it for you. You have to do it all alone.
”
”
Robert Anton Wilson (Natural Law: or Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy)
“
While some additional plots were foiled by the Department of Homeland Security, many of their claims have turned out to be the proverbial elephant repellent, with every elephant-free day serving as proof of its effectiveness.
”
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Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity)
“
The Natural History Museum is open to the public on Tuesdays and Fridays. Elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus; extraordinary animals! Rubens rendered them marvelously. I had a feeling of happiness as soon as I entered the place and the further I went the stronger it grew. I felt my whole being rise above commonplaces and trivialities and the petty worries of my daily life. What an immense variety of animals and species of different shapes and functions!
”
”
Eugène Delacroix
“
Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the state apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of the State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, I contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases.
Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. One the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing and deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere…) Another justice, another movement, another space-time.
”
”
Gilles Deleuze
“
Rambha had given Gandhi an enchanting image to describe the power of mantra. She compared the practice of mantra to the training of an elephant. “As the elephant walks through the market,” taught Rambha, “he swings his trunk from side to side and creates havoc with it wherever he goes—knocking over fruit stands and scattering vendors, snatching bananas and coconuts wherever possible. His trunk is naturally restless, hungry, scattered, undisciplined. This is just like the mind—constantly causing trouble.
”
”
Stephen Cope (The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling)
“
There is a connection to all living things, a vibration of Life. Animals were not given a power of choice. A lion does not try to eat legumes nor an elephant meat. We believe the best way to communicate with nature, God, is through a liaison: the animals.
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Ralph Helfer (Modoc: True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived)
“
Elephants command attention. But their size is not what makes the heart skip a beat. It's how they walk with the world's weight on their shoulders, sensitive, noble, their hearts pulsing and as wide open as the great grey leaves that are their ears. MoFos used to say that an elephant never forgets and until this very moment, I hadn't understood what that really meant. An elephant's memories don't reside in organ or skin or bone. They live closer to tree time than we do, and their memories reside in the soul of their species, which dwarfs them in size, is untouchable, and lives on forever to honor every story. They carry stories from generations back, as far as when their ancestors wore fur coats, That is why, when you are close to an elephant, you feel so deeply. If they so choose, they have the ability to hold your sadness so you may safely sit in the lonely seat of loss, still hopeful and full of love. Their great secret is that they know everything is a tide—not a black tide, but the natural breath of life—in and out, in and out, and to be with them is to know this too, And here they were, suddenly lifting the weight of our sadness for us, carrying it in the curl of their trunks. We all sat together in our loss, not dwelling, but remembering. For an elephant never forgets,
”
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Kira Jane Buxton (Hollow Kingdom (Hollow Kingdom, #1))
“
Consider how odd it would be if all we knew about elephants had been written by elephants. Would we recognize one? What elephant author would describe--or perhaps even perceive--the features which are common to all elephants? We would find ourselves detecting these from indirect clues; for instance, elephant-naturalists would surely tell us that all other animals suffer from noselessness, which obliges them to use their paws in an unnatural way. [...]So when the human male describes his world he maps its distances from his unspoken natural center of reference, himself.
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Alice Bradley Sheldon
“
A bee, though small, can still sting you;
an elephant, though calm, can still trample you;
and a lion, though full, can still devour you.
An ant, though small, can still bite you;
a spider, though tiny, can still infect you;
and a wolf, though little, can still harm you.
A petal, though innocuous, can still poison you;
a flower, though delicate, can still contaminate you;
and a plant, though immature, can still toxify you.
A thought, though entertaining, can still pollute you;
a desire, though pleasing, can still defile you;
and an experience, though pleasurable, can still dishonor you.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
The particular strangeness of Mormon beliefs, for example, testifies to the exceptional strength of the Mormon moral community. To maintain such stigmatizing beliefs in the modern era, in the face of science, the news media, and the Internet, is quite the feat of solidarity. And while many people (perhaps even many of our readers) would enjoy being part of such a community, how many are willing to “pay their dues” by adopting a worldview that conflicts with so many of their other beliefs, and which nonbelievers are apt to ridicule? These high costs are exactly the point. Joining a religious community isn’t like signing up for a website; you can’t just hop in on a lark. You have to get socialized into it, coaxed in through social ties and slowly acculturated to the belief system. And when this process plays out naturally, it won’t even feel like a painful sacrifice because you’ll be getting more out of it than you give up.
”
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Kevin Simler (The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
“
Was it Robert Stone who said the mind is a monkey? Sure it was, in Dog Soldiers. The one where Stone also said that men who shoot elephants with machine guns from Huey helicopters are just naturally going to want to get high. In Iraq it was camels the grunts and jarheads sometimes shot at. But yeah, while they were high.
”
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Stephen King (Billy Summers)
“
We need good liturgies, and we need natural ones; we need a life neither patternless nor over patterned, if the city is to be built. And I think the root of it all is caring. Not that that will turn the trick all by itself, but that we can produce nothing good without it. True liturgies take things for what they really are, and offer them up in loving delight. Adam naming the animals is instituting the first of all the liturgies; speech, by which man the priest of creation picks up each of the world's pieces and by his wonder bears it into the dance. "By George," he says, "there's an elephant in my garden; isn't that something!" Adam has been at work a long time; civilization is the fruit of his priestly labors. Culture is the liturgy of nature as it is offered up by man. But culture can come only from caring enough about things to want them really to be themselves - to want the poem to scan perfectly, the song to be genuinely melodic, the basketball actually to drop through the middle of the hoop, the edge of the board to be utterly straight, the pastry to be really flaky. Few of us have very many great things to care about, but we all have plenty of small ones; and that's enough for the dance. It is precisely through the things we put on the table, and the liturgies we form around it, that the city is built, caring is more than half the work.
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Robert Farrar Capon (Bed and Board: Plain Talk About Marriage)
“
In giving rise to man, the evolutionary process has, apparently for the first and only time in the history of the Cosmos, become conscious of itself.
So, the Devil's Chaplain might conclude, Stand tall, Bipedal Ape. The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence; the gift of revulsion against its implications; the gift of foresight — something utterly foreign to the blundering short-term ways of natural selection — and the gift of internalizing the very cosmos.
”
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Richard Dawkins (A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love)
“
We think and believe that we are exceptional. We have created so many stories around how exceptional humans are. We were created by the hands of the divine, and the universe is our gift. We believe that it was all created to serve us, but the reality of the matter is, we are not exceptional except for our ability to kill beauty and destroy. We are not as fast as the gazelle or a cheetah; we can't fly like birds; we don't have fur to protect us in the cold; we don't have natural strength to lift heavy objects like a gorilla or an elephant. We created fables to explain our presence, even scientific ones that we can't prove. It is all unproven theories, on all sides. We are not exceptional; we are only exceptional when we work together and in sync with nature like every other creature.
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Hani Selim (Osama's Jihad)
“
My parents’ cherished heirloom looks ridiculous in the new house. But then all our New York stuff does. Our dignified elephant of a chesterfield with its matching baby ottoman sits in the living room looking stunned, as if it got sleep-darted in its natural environment and woke up in this strange new captivity, surrounded by faux-posh carpet and synthetic wood and unveined walls. I do miss our old place –
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Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
“
Where, then, is the discretion or the reason in loading burdens on the backs of those whose strength has not first been tested to make sure that the tasks assigned to human beings are in line with their natural constitutions? Would anyone give a donkey the same load as an elephant? Or the young or very old the same loads as full adults? Can the frail bear as much as the hardy, or the sickly as much as the well?
”
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Pierre Abélard (The Letters and Other Writings: Selected Songs and Poems (Hackett Classics))
“
How important was mantra to Gandhi’s transformation? Extremely. When done systematically, mantra has a powerful effect on the brain. It gathers and focuses the energy of the mind. It teaches the mind to focus on one point, and it cultivates a steadiness that over time becomes an unshakable evenness of temper. The cultivation of this quality of “evenness” is a central principle of the Bhagavad Gita. It is called samatva in Sanskrit, and it is a central pillar of Krishna’s practice. When the mind develops steadiness, teaches Krishna, it is not shaken by fear or greed. So, in his early twenties, Gandhi had already begun to develop a still-point at the center of his consciousness—a still-point that could not be shaken. This little seed of inner stillness would grow into a mighty oak. Gandhi would become an immovable object. Rambha had given Gandhi an enchanting image to describe the power of mantra. She compared the practice of mantra to the training of an elephant. “As the elephant walks through the market,” taught Rambha, “he swings his trunk from side to side and creates havoc with it wherever he goes—knocking over fruit stands and scattering vendors, snatching bananas and coconuts wherever possible. His trunk is naturally restless, hungry, scattered, undisciplined. This is just like the mind—constantly causing trouble.” “But the wise elephant trainer,” said Rambha, “will give the elephant a stick of bamboo to hold in his trunk. The elephant likes this. He holds it fast. And as soon as the elephant wraps his trunk around the bamboo, the trunk begins to settle. Now the elephant strides through the market like a prince: calm, collected, focused, serene. Bananas and coconuts no longer distract.” So too with the mind. As soon as the mind grabs hold of the mantra, it begins to settle. The mind holds the mantra gently, and it becomes focused, calm, centered. Gradually this mind becomes extremely concentrated. This is the beginning stage of meditation. All meditation traditions prescribe some beginning practice of gathering, focusing, and concentration—and in the yoga tradition this is most often achieved precisely through mantra. The whole of Chapter Six in the Bhagavad Gita is devoted to Krishna’s teachings on this practice: “Whenever the mind wanders, restless and diffuse in its search for satisfaction without, lead it within; train it to rest in the Self,” instructs Krishna. “When meditation is mastered, the mind is unwavering like the flame of a lamp in a windless place.
”
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Stephen Cope (The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling)
“
I am a Hindu because of sculptured cones of red kumkum powder and baskets of yellow turmeric nuggets, because of garlands of flowers and pieces of broken coconut, because of the clanging of bells to announce one's arrival to God, because of the while of the reedy nadaswaram and the beating of drums, because of the patter of bare feet against stone floors down dark corridors pierced by shafts of sunlight, because of the fragrance of incense, because of flames of arati lamps circling in the darkness, because of bhajans being sweetly sung, because of elephants standing around to bless, because of colourful murals telling colourful stories, because of foreheads carrying, variously signified, the same word - faith. I became loyal to these sense impressions even before I knew what they meant or what they were for. It is my heart that commands me so. I feel at home in a Hindu temple. I am aware of Presence, not personal the way we usually presence, but something larger. My heart still skips a beat when I catch sight of the murti, of God Residing, in the inner sanctum of the temple. Truly I am in a sacred cosmic womb, a place where everything is born, and it is my sweet luck to behold its living core. My hands naturally come together in reverent worship.
”
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Yann Martel (Life of Pi)
“
Most of us operate from a narrower frame of reference than that of which we are capable, failing to transcend the influence of our particular culture, our particular set of parents and our particular childhood experience upon our understanding. It is no wonder, then, that the world of humanity is so full of conflict. We have a situation in which human beings, who must deal with each other, have vastly different views as to the nature of reality, yet each one believes his or her own view to be the correct one since it is based on the microcosm of personal experience. And to make matters worse, most of us are not even fully aware of our own world views, much less the uniqueness of the experience from which they are derived. Bryant Wedge, a psychiatrist specializing in the field of international relations, studied negotiations between the United States and the U.S.S.R. and was able to delineate a number of basic assumptions as to the nature of human beings and society and the world held by Americans which differed dramatically from the assumptions of Russians. These assumptions dictated the negotiating behavior of both sides. Yet neither side was aware of its own assumptions or the fact that the other side was operating on a different set of assumptions. The inevitable result was that the negotiating behavior of the Russians seemed to the Americans to be either crazy or deliberately evil, and of course the Americans seemed to the Russians equally crazy or evil.24 We are indeed like the three proverbial blind men, each in touch with only his particular piece of the elephant yet each claiming to know the nature of the whole beast. So we squabble over our different microcosmic world views, and all wars are holy wars.
”
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M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
“
If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.
”
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Bertrand Russell (Why I Am Not a Christian)
“
You know, Mo, I've been thinking of the Elephantarium lately. You remember Atoul, the white elephant? Well, he taught me that all things need to change form to live. When we die, we change into ashes, gases, things like that. They carry on until they change. The ashes may help a tree grow, the gases could mingle with others and become...something else! That means you and I are going to change and...ah....well..." His voice stuck in his throat. He stopped, cleared his throat, turned, and walked to Mo. He rubbed the soft leathery skin on the underside of her ear. "and you... You will become something greater and more wonderful than you can imagine! You will soar in the cosmos, become part of all things, you will sit at HIS side and help rule all of nature." Bram's whole being felt the impact... The thought of not being with her. "I will be waiting for you, okay? I'll meet you there.
”
”
Ralph Helfer (Modoc: The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived)
“
Giving equal consideration to all suffering will likely mean prioritizing non-human suffering on the margin, partly because non-human beings are so numerous, partly because their suffering is often extremely intense, and partly because their suffering is uniquely neglected — especially the suffering occurring on factory farms, in the fishing industry, and in nature; three of the biggest screaming elephants in the room of modern political discourse.
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Magnus Vinding (Reasoned Politics)
“
animal suicide accounts gave scientists, natural historians, and the general public a means of reflecting on the concept of human self-destruction as well as ideas about humanity’s relationship to nature without always having to talk about people. Writing and thinking about animal suicides, just as we saw with the cases of animal heartbreak and homesickness, gave people a way to ponder their own afflictions, even if they were doing it unconciously.
”
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Laurel Braitman (Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves)
“
We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew.
Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways-the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days-that's something else.
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Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death)
“
If interest rates are kept below their natural level, misguided investments occur: too much time is used in production, or, put another way, the investment returns don’t justify the initial outlay. ‘Malinvestment’, to use a term popularized by Austrian economists, comes in many shapes and sizes. It might involve some expensive white-elephant project, such as constructing a tunnel under the sea, or a pie-in-the-sky technology scheme with no serious prospect of ever turning a profit.
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Edward Chancellor (The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest)
“
Wonderful is the wit and subtiltie that dumb creatures have & how they shift for themselves and annoy their enemies: which is the only difficultie that they have to arise and grow to so great an height and excessive bignesse. The dragon therefore espying the Elephant when he goeth to releese, assaileth him from an high tree and launceth himselfe upon him; but the Elephant knowing well enough well enough he is not able to withstand his windings and knittings about him, seeketh to come close to some trees or hard rockes, and so forth to crush and squise the dragon between him and them: the dragons ware hereof, entangle and snarle his feet and legges first with their taile: the Elephants on the other side, undoe those knots with their trunke as with a hand: but to prevent that againe, the dragons put in their heads into their snout, and so stop their breath, and withall, fret and gnaw the tenderest parts that they find there.
(Translated by Philomel Holland, 1601.
"The Book of Naturalists: An Anthology of the Best Natural History", 1944. p. 20)
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Pliny the Elder (Naturalis Historiae)
“
Jalal-ud-Din Rumi used to tell a story about a far distant country, somewhere to the north of Afghanistan. In this country there was a city inhabited entirely by the blind. One day the news came that an elephant was passing outside the walls of this city. ‘The citizens called a meeting and decided to send a delegation of three men outside the gates so that they could report back what an elephant was. In due course, the three men left the town and stumbled forwards until they eventually found the elephant. The three reached out, felt the animal with their hands, then they all headed back to the town as quickly as they could to report what they had felt. ‘The first man said: “An elephant is a marvellous creature! It is like a vast snake, but it can stand vertically upright in the air!” The second man was indignant at hearing this: “What nonsense!” he said. “This man is misleading you. I felt the elephant and what it most resembles is a pillar. It is firm and solid and however hard you push against it you could never knock it over.” The third man shook his head and said: “Both these men are liars! I felt the elephant and it resembles a broad pankah. It is wide and flat and leathery and when you shake it it wobbles around like the sail of a dhow.” All three men stuck by their stories and for the rest of their lives they refused to speak to each other. Each professed that they and only they knew the whole truth. ‘Now of course all three of the blind men had a measure of insight. The first man felt the trunk of the elephant, the second the leg, the third the ear. All had part of the truth, but not one of them had even begun to grasp the totality or the greatness of the beast they had encountered. If only they had listened to one another and meditated on the different facets of the elephant, they might have realized the true nature of the beast. But they were too proud and instead they preferred to keep to their own half-truths. ‘So it is with us. We see Allah one way, the Hindus have a different conception, and the Christians have a third. To us, all our different visions seem incompatible and irreconcilable. But what we forget is that before God we are like blind men stumbling around in total blackness ...
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Anonymous
“
(For awhile there I was trying to remember the chain of events that precisely landed me doing this activity in this place on this planet at this time but couldn’t…. That was scary. I am just *existing* at times, having dropped all extraneous ruminations as to how or why. It seems natural to be on the bus smiling as the two Hindu women chat away while we share butter crackers and look at the rice paddies in the valley below. Goats scatter as the bus slams to a creep. Doesn’t everyone do this?)
from wordpress blog:
http://joeniemczura.wordpress.com/201...
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Joe Niemczura
“
{On to contributions to evolutionary biology of 18th century French scientist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon}
He was not an evolutionary biologist, yet he was the father of evolutionism. He was the first person to discuss a large number of evolutionary problems, problems that before Buffon had not been raised by anybody.... he brought them to the attention of the scientific world.
Except for Aristotle and Darwin, no other student of organisms [whole animals and plants] has had as far-reaching an influence.
He brought the idea of evolution into the realm of science. He developed a concept of the "unity of type", a precursor of comparative anatomy. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the acceptance of a long-time scale for the history of the earth. He was one of the first to imply that you get inheritance from your parents, in a description based on similarities between elephants and mammoths. And yet, he hindered evolution by his frequent endorsement of the immutability of species. He provided a criterion of species, fertility among members of a species, that was thought impregnable.
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Ernst W. Mayr
“
Basically, live foods are those that are created through the natural interaction of the sun, air, soil and water. What I’m talking about here is a vegetarian diet. Fill your plate with fresh vegetables, fruits and grains and you might just live forever.” “Is that possible?” “Most of the sages were well over one hundred and they showed no signs of slowing down, and just last week I read in the paper about a group of people living on the tiny island of Okinawa in the East China Sea. Researchers are flocking to the island because they are fascinated by the fact that it holds the largest concentration of centenarians in the world.” “What have they learned?” “That a vegetarian diet is one of their main longevity secrets.” “But is this type of diet healthy? You wouldn’t think that it would give you much strength. Remember, I’m still a busy litigator, Julian.” “This is the diet that nature intended. It is alive, vital and supremely healthy. The sages have lived by this diet for many thousands of years. They call it a sattvic, or pure diet. And as to your concern about strength, the most powerful animals on the planet, ranging from gorillas to elephants, wear the badge of proud vegetarians. Did you know that a gorilla has about thirty times the strength of a man?
”
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Robin Sharma (The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams & Reaching Your Destiny)
“
but does it serve any useful purpose to know that Pompey was the first to exhibit the slaughter of eighteen elephants in the Circus, pitting criminals against them in a mimic battle? He, a leader of the state and one who, according to report, was conspicuous among the leaders28 of old for the kindness of his heart, thought it a notable kind of spectacle to kill human beings after a new fashion. Do they fight to the death? That is not enough! Are they torn to pieces? That is not enough! Let them be crushed by animals of monstrous bulk! Better would it be that these things pass into oblivion lest hereafter some all-powerful man should learn them and be jealous of an act that was nowise human.29 O, what blindness does great prosperity cast upon our minds! When he was casting so many troops of wretched human beings to wild beasts born under a different sky, when he was proclaiming war between creatures so ill matched, when he was shedding so much blood before the eyes of the Roman people, who itself was soon to be forced to shed more. he then believed that he was beyond the power of Nature. But later this same man, betrayed by Alexandrine treachery, offered himself to the dagger of the vilest slave, and then at last discovered what an empty boast his surname30 was.
”
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Seneca (On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It (Penguin Great Ideas))
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Preschoolers make a number of assumptions about words and their meaning as they acquire language, one of the most important of which is what the psychologist Ellen Markman calls the principle of mutual exclusivity. Simply put, this means that small children have difficulty believing that any one object can have two different names. The natural assumption of children, Markman argues, is that if an object or person is given a second label, then that label must refer to some secondary property or attribute of that object. You can see how useful this assumption is to a child faced with the extraordinary task of assigning a word to everything in the world. A child who learns the word elephant knows, with absolute certainty, that it is something different from a dog. Each new word makes the child's knowledge of the world more precise. Without mutual exclusivity, by contrast, if a child thought that elephant could simply be another label for dog, then each new word would make the world seem more complicated. Mutual exclusivity also helps the child think clearly. "Suppose," Markman writes, "a child who already knows 'apple' and 'red' hears someone refer to an apple as 'round.' By mutual exclusivity, the child can eliminate the object (apple) and its color (red) as the meaning of 'round' and can try to analyze the object for some other property to label.
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Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
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Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things— the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick)
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One article on reproductive strategies was titled "Sneaky Fuckers." Kya laughed.
As is well known, the article began, in nature, usually the males with the most prominent secondary sexual characteristics, such as the biggest antlers, deepest voices, broadest chests, and superior knowledge secure the best territories because they have fended off weaker males. The females choose to mate with these imposing alphas and are thereby inseminated with the best DNA around, which is passed on to the female's offspring- one of the most powerful phenomena in the adaptation and continuance of life. Plus, the females get the best territory for their young.
However, some stunted males, not strong, adorned, or smart enough to hold good territories, possess bags of tricks to fool the females. They parade their smaller forms around in pumped-up postures or shout frequently- even if in shrill voices. By relying on pretense and false signals, they manage to grab a copulation here or there. Pint-sized male bullfrogs, the author wrote, hunker down in the grass and hide near an alpha male who is croaking with great gusto to call in mates. When several females are attracted to his strong vocals at the same time, and the alpha is busy copulating with one, the weaker male leaps in and mates one of the others. The imposter males were referred to as "sneaky fuckers."
Kya remembered, those many years ago, Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. "Unworthy boys make a lot of noise," Ma had said.
She read a consolation for females. Nature is audacious enough to ensure that the males who send out dishonest signals or go from one female to the next almost always end up alone.
Another article delved into the wild rivalries between sperm. Across most life-forms, males compete to inseminate females. Male lions occasionally fight to the death; rival bull elephants lock tusks and demolish the ground beneath their feet as they tear at each other's flesh. Though very ritualized, the conflicts can still end in mutilations.
To avoid such injuries, inseminators of some species compete in less violent, more creative methods. Insects, the most imaginative. The penis of the male damselfly is equipped with a small scoop, which removes sperm ejected by a previous opponent before he supplies his own.
Kya dropped the journal on her lap, her mind drifting with the clouds. Some female insects eat their mates, overstressed mammal mothers abandon their young, many males design risky or shifty ways to outsperm their competitors. Nothing seemed too indecorous as long as the tick and the tock of life carried on. She knew this was not a dark side to Nature, just inventive ways to endure against all odds. Surely for humans there was more.
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Delia Owens (Where the Crawdads Sing)
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So, the Devil’s Chaplain might conclude, Stand tall, Bipedal Ape. The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence; the gift of revulsion against its implications; the gift of foresight – something utterly foreign to the blundering short-term ways of natural selection – and the gift of internalizing the very cosmos. We are blessed with brains which, if educated and allowed free rein, are capable of modelling the universe, with its physical laws in which the Darwinian algorithm is embedded.
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Richard Dawkins (A Devil's Chaplain)
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The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organisation, and maximise chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organise chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. "It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe," James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions, and excuses. The laws of nature still mark the outer boundaries of permissibility – but life, in all its idiosyncratic, mad weirdness, flourishes by reading between the lines. Even the elephant cannot violate the law of thermodynamics – although its trunk, surely, must rank as one of the most peculiar means of moving matter using energy.
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Siddhartha Mukhergee
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If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel's-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old? No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk. So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.
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G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
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Excepting the sublime breach—somewhere else to be described—this peaking of the whale’s flukes is perhaps the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all beings.
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Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
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Most people I meet are stupid. Now, nobody likes to be labeled as stupid because they don’t want to know the truth about themselves, that they’re more useful dead than alive. The vast majority of those that meet me for the first time don’t believe that I’ve worked as a College Professor, or that I make a living as a writer. In fact, many have stopped talking to me because they believe I make a living doing something illegal, something criminal. It’s easier for them to believe that I’m just a criminal, than to accept that I’m one of the most famous bestselling writers in the entire planet. The ones that reach the next level, will ask me if I belong to any secret organization, if I speak to demons or if I channel the dead, or even if I steal information from the internet and other authors. Now, what they can’t see, is that the more they talk such things, the more they show me their real nature. They are very, really very, stupid. They can’t see an elephant in front of their nose; they can’t see an intelligent human being in front of their face; they are indeed very stupid and that’s a fact, not an assumption.
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Robin Sacredfire
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Ames, having explained the condition of juvenile elephants, drew this metaphor: Trans women are juvenile elephants. We are much stronger and more powerful than we understand. We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma, armed with ivory spears and faces unique in nature, living in grasslands where any of the ubiquitous humans may or may not be a poacher. With our strength, we can destroy each other with ease. But we are a lost generation. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain. No matriarchs to tell the young girls to knock it off or show off their own long lives lived happily and well. Those older generations of trans women died of HIV, poverty, suicide, repression, or disappeared to pathologized medicalization and stealth lives - and that's if they were lucky enough to be white. They left behind only scattered exhausted voices to tell the angry lost young when and how the pain might end - to tell us what will be lost when we lash out with our considerable strength, or use the fragile shards of what remain of our social networks to ostracize, punish, and retaliate against those who behave in a traumatized manner.
"And so we become what we have seen. How could we know not to? Have you seen many orphaned juvenile elephants behaving otherwise?
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Torrey Peters (Detransition, Baby)
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Now there is this song on the saxophone. And I am ashamed. A glorious little suffering has just been born, an exemplary suffering. Four notes on the saxophone. They come and go, they seem to say: You must be like us, suffer in rhythm. All right! Naturally, I’d like to suffer that way, in rhythm, without complacence, without self-pity, with an arid purity. But is it my fault if the beer at the bottom of my glass is warm, if there are brown stains on the mirror, if I am not wanted, if the sincerest of my sufferings drags and weighs, with too much flesh and the skin too wide at the same time, like a sea-elephant, with bulging eyes, damp and touching and yet so ugly? No, they certainly can’t tell me it’s compassionate—this little jewelled pain which spins around above the record and dazzles me. Not even ironic: it spins gaily, completely self-absorbed; like a scythe it has cut through the drab intimacy of the world and now it spins and all of us, Madeleine, the thick-set man, the patronne, myself, the tables, benches, the stained mirror, the glasses, all of us abandon ourselves to existence, because we were among ourselves, only among ourselves, it has taken us unawares, in the disorder, the day to day drift: I am ashamed for myself and for what exists in front of it.
It does not exist. It is even an annoyance; if I were to get up and rip this record from the table which holds it, if I were to break it in two, I wouldn’t reach it. It is beyond—always beyond something, a voice, a violin note. Through layers and layers of existence, it veils itself, thin and firm, and when you want to seize it, you find only existants, you butt against existants devoid of sense. It is behind them: I don’t even hear it, I hear sounds, vibrations in the air which unveil it. It does not exist because it has nothing superfluous: it is all the rest which in relation to it is superfluous. It is.
And I, too, wanted to be. That is all I wanted; this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bonds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note. That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world. He existed, like other people, in a world of public parks, bistros, commercial cities and he wanted to persuade himself that he was living somewhere else, behind the canvas of paintings, with the doges of Tintoretto, with Gozzoli’s Florentines, behind the pages of books, with Fabrizio del Dongo and Julien Sorel, behind the phonograph records, with the long dry laments of jazz. And then, after making a complete fool of himself, he understood, he opened his eyes, he saw that it was a misdeal: he was in a bistro, just in front of a glass of warm beer. He stayed overwhelmed on the bench; he thought: I am a fool. And at that very moment, on the other side of existence, in this other world which you can see in the distance, but without ever approaching it, a little melody began to sing and dance: “You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.
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Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea)
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speed in which he shifts nearly stops my heart. One moment I’m talking to him, the next a gigantic feline prowls over the long dining room table, batting plates aside and growling as he stalks toward me. Scooting my chair back, properly terrified, I quickly say, “Apparently I was wrong.” The lion still appears as if he’s going to attack. “A lion is impressive, yes, but what about an elephant?” I continue. “Can you change into a beast that large? Surely not.” With a loud crack and flying wood, the table collapses as the lion morphs into a creature so gigantic, there is scarcely room for him. Dishes, settings, and candelabras fly this way and that. The elephant holds a huge foot over me. “Are you impressed yet, Carabas?” “Quite,” I squeak and then clear my throat. “But, now that I think of it, it’s only natural that a large creature such as yourself can change into other large creatures. Not that difficult, really.” Slowly, the ogre-elephant lowers his foot, looking as if he’s about to gore me with his tusks. Standing, hoping to put a little distance between me and the beast, I add, “But to change into something tiny, something insignificant—now that would be a feat.” “Like what, Carabas?” the ogre glares at me with foreign eyes. “A rabbit? A grouse?” I shrug. “Certainly, but what about something as tiny as…a mouse? That would be quite impossible, would it not?” And just like that, the elephant is gone, vanished before my very eyes. I frantically look for him in the broken plates, splintered table, and mess of molten wax on the floor. Before I even spot the rodent the ogre shifted into, Puss leaps into the middle of the mess, pouncing with outstretched paws and a greedy look in his bright green eyes. A tiny gray tail disappears into the cat’s mouth, and that is my very last glimpse of the ogre. I stare at Puss with disbelief. The world slows, and the steady thrum of the grandfather clock in the corner is the only thing that tells me that time hasn’t actually stopped. “It
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Shari L. Tapscott (Puss without Boots (Fairy Tale Kingdoms, #1))
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In the wild, a young female is an allomother long before she bears her own offspring. She has fifteen years to practice being a big sister to the calves that are born to the herd. I’d seen calves approach young female elephants to suckle for comfort, even though the juveniles did not have breasts or milk yet. But the young female would put her foot forward, the way her mother and aunties did, and proudly pretend. She could act like a mother without having any of the real responsibility until she was ready. But when there is no family to teach a young female to raise her own calf, things can go horribly awry. When I was working in Pilanesberg, this story repeated itself. There, young bulls that had been translocated began to charge vehicles. They killed a tourist. More than forty white rhino were found dead in the reserve before we realized that these subadult males were the ones who’d attacked them—highly aggressive behavior that was far from normal. What is the common denominator for the odd behavior of the young female elephant that didn’t care about her own calf and the belligerent pack of teenage bulls? Certainly there was a lack of parental guidance. But was that the only issue at play? All those elephants had seen their families killed in front of them, as a result of culling. The grief that I have studied in the wild, where a herd loses an old matriarch, for example, must be contrasted to the grief that comes from observing the violent death of a family member—because the long-term effects are so markedly different. After a natural death, the herd encourages the grieving individual to eventually move on. After a mass killing by humans, there is—by definition—no herd left for support. To date, the animal research community has been reluctant to believe that elephant behavior might be affected by the trauma of watching one’s family being killed. I think this isn’t scientific objection as much as it is political shame—after all, we humans have been the perpetrators of this violence. At the very least, it is crucial when studying the grief of elephants to remember that death is a natural occurrence. Murder is not.
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Jodi Picoult (Leaving Time)
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Christopher Phelan was talking with Prudence Mercer. The scheme of formal black and white was becoming to any man. On someone like Christopher, it was literally breathtaking. He wore the clothes with natural ease, his posture relaxed but straight, his shoulders broad. The crisp white of his starched cravat provided a striking contrast to his tawny skin, while the light of chandeliers glittered over his golden-bronze hair.
Following her gaze, Amelia lifted her brows. “What an attractive man,” she said. Her attention returned to Beatrix. “You like him, don’t you?”
Before Beatrix could help herself, she sent her sister a pained glance. Letting her gaze drop to the floor, she said, “There have been a dozen times in the past when I should have liked a particular gentleman. When it would have been convenient, and appropriate, and easy. But no, I had to wait for someone special. Someone who would make my heart feel as if it’s been trampled by elephants, thrown into the Amazon, and eaten by piranhas.”
Amelia smiled at her compassionately. Her gloved hand slipped over Beatrix’s. “Darling Bea. Would it console you to hear that such feelings of infatuation are perfectly ordinary?”
Beatrix turned her palm upward, returning the clasp of her sister’s hand. Since their mother had died when Bea was twelve, Amelia had been a source of endless love and patience. “Is it infatuation?” she heard herself asking softly. “Because it feels much worse than that. Like a fatal disease.”
“I don’t know, dear. It’s difficult to tell the difference between love and infatuation. Time will reveal it, eventually.” Amelia paused. “He is attracted to you,” she said. “We all noticed the other night. Why don’t you encourage him, dear?”
Beatrix felt her throat tighten. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t explain,” Beatrix said miserably, “except to say that I’ve deceived him.”
Amelia glanced at her in surprise. “That doesn’t sound like you. You’re the least deceptive person I’ve ever known.”
“I didn’t mean to do it. And he doesn’t know that it was me. But I think he suspects.”
“Oh.” Amelia frowned as she absorbed the perplexing statement. “Well. This does seem to be a muddle. Perhaps you should confide in him. His reaction may surprise you. What is it that Mother used to say whenever we pushed her to the limits of her patience?...’Love forgives all things.’ Do you remember?”
“Of course,” Beatrix said. She had written that exact phrase to Christopher in one of her letters. Her throat went very tight. “Amelia, I can’t discuss this now. Or I’ll start weeping and throw myself to the floor.”
“Heavens, don’t do that. Someone might trip over you.
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Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))