Three Squares and a Cot

So, for some reason I pulled The Life of Pi off the bookshelf last night and started rereading it. For most people, there would be nothing strange in that. For me, though, it’s more than a little weird. You see, I was raised in a reading household. My father, the electronic engineering wizard who could build a short-wave radio out of a Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco can, a coat hanger and a few pennies, didn’t have much use for television. Ours gave out during JFK’s funeral procession, and I think we got our next one sometime around Watergate. Dad could have fixed it – repaired others’ sets and our hi-fi and all sorts of gizmos with vacuum tubes, capacitors, resistors and whatnot – but not our television.

So we read. A lot. And I’ve never knowingly read the same book twice, with the possible exception of To Kill a Mockingbird. So my voluntarily picking up The Life of Pi is actually significant. I think. Maybe…

No, I’m not going to do a review for you here. If you can read this blog then you can get yourself over to a library or the discount book store or Amazon or wherever you get your reading materials, buy the darn thing and read it yourself. And I strongly recommend you do. I digress…

So, I’m sitting on the throne meditating this morning (figures of speech both) and reading my book, when I ran across an early passage I didn’t recall from my last go round, which was admittedly several years ago. Did I mention that I pretty much remember in a very hazy way virtually every book I’ve ever read? Well, I do. I never remember the author or the title, but if I inadvertently pick up a previously read tome – within a couple of pages I will remember not only that I read it, but generally about when, and the whole story line. I have always been that way and sometimes find it a little disconcerting. It’s funny, actually, because I am one of the most forgetful people you’d ever want to meet, and yet I seem unable to fully forget anything I’ve ever read. The wife reminds me when I pick up something I’ve already read, because she knows I value efficiency, and that I’ll be back up out of bed and returning it to the bookshelf within five minutes once I’m made the discovery myself. Crazy, huh?

Dammit, I digressed again. Sorry…

Anyhow, Pi, the main human character in the story, was the son of a zoo keeper, and he delivers a pretty thought provoking exposition on the lives of animals in the wild and in captivity, and ties it back to humans just a bit, leaving me, the reader, to carry the thought a step farther. His contention is that modern zoo critics, PETA and others, are all wrong about zoos, animal happiness, and so forth. He suggests that wild animals need, rather than want, a certain amount of territory, because it takes that much territory to provide sustenance and security. I’m not a wildlife expert by any stretch, but it makes sense to me. For instance, jungles are teaming with wildlife in great concentration, precisely because there is an abundance of food and water, the relative security that comes with adequate cover, and the unit strength achieved when a troop or pack or gaggle or whatever is sufficient in number and cohesion to create a certain acceptable level of security. As the habitat dwindles, food sources thin, and water becomes more scarce, more territory is required to fulfill these needs. At some point the sustenance becomes insufficient to allow further expansion, so the group’s size is thereby limited. Likewise, if populations grow too large and food becomes too scarce, infant mortality rises. Too much inbreeding? Ditto. Is nature cool, or what?

His point is that the individual animal, given adequate room and a comfortable environment, adequate interaction with members of its species, and ample food and water, is likely happier in a zoo than in the wild because the security concern is largely absent. As an example, he cites numerous cases of animals escaping from, and then voluntarily returning to, various zoos throughout the world and history, due to the less stressful life there. No, I’m not going to argue with you. Sounds plausible and made me think, and that’s enough for me…

So then I started extrapolating from that brief passage what, if anything, might this say about humanity and our condition and behavior. And here’s what I came up with. Modern industrialized westernized humans are like animals in a zoo. We have given up our freedom and our connection with nature in exchange for the security of the civilized common. And all of this being relatively new in evolutionary terms, some of us take to this transition better than others. I, for one, hanker for something decidedly more primitive, largely because I’ve not yet had my fill of it – barely a teaspoon if truth be told. Whenever I get in the mountains or near the ocean or next to a babbling brook - far away from anything attesting to the presence of a single other human, I feel myself sucked into it like an iron filing to a magnet. And I can’t get in deep enough and I can’t stay long enough. The same circumstance will drive other moderns to sheer panic, a trembling fear which can only be settled by the rumble of engines, the smell of diesel, the glow of street lights, the reassuring snick of a door latch catching, or the road hiss of a nearby highway.

I’m afraid I am not the zoo animal that would turn and head back to the cage, but more the fool raised in captivity who would charge off into the wilderness, never looking back. And I would no doubt be taken on my first night by a hungry animal. And I think I might be happier in my departure than I was in my previous condition. And my killer would settle in under a rocky overhang, dozing peacefully with a full stomach, and dreaming about what exactly he needs to do to be accepted into the comfortably easy life of the zoo creatures…