“Is this fact?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s mythology,” I said.
“Of which no trace is to be found in your culture.”
“That’s right.”
Once again Ishmael stared at me glumly through the glass.
“Look,” I said after a bit. “The things you’re showing me, the things you’re doing, are… almost beyond belief. I know that. But it’s just not in me to leap up out of my chair while striking my brow and crying, ‘My God, this is incredible!’ ”
He wrinkled his forehead thoughtfully for a moment before saying: “What’s
He seemed so genuinely concerned that I had to smile. “All frozen inside,” I told him. “An iceberg.”
He shook his head, sorry for me.
4
“To return to our subject…. As you say, it took man a long, long time to tumble to the fact that he was meant for greater things than he could achieve living like a lion or a wombat. For some three million years he was just part of the anarchy, was just one more creature rolling around in the slime.”
“Right.”
“It was only about ten thousand years ago that he finally realized that his place was not in the slime. He had to lift himself out of the slime and take this place in hand and straighten it out.”
“Right.”
“But the world didn’t meekly submit to human rule, did it?”
“No.”
“No, the world defied him. What man built up, the wind and rain tore down. The fields he cleared for his crops and his villages, the jungle fought to reclaim. The seeds he sowed, the birds snatched away. The shoots he nurtured, the insects nibbled. The harvest he stored, the mice plundered. The animals he bred and fed, the wolves and foxes stole away. The mountains, the rivers, and the oceans stood in their places and would not make way for him. The earthquake, the flood, the hurricane, the blizzard, and the drought would not disappear at his command.”
“True.”
“The world would not meekly submit to man’s rule, so he had to do what to it?”
“What do you mean?”
“If the king comes to a city that will not submit to his rule, what does he have to do?”
“He has to conquer it.”
“Of course. In order to make himself the ruler of the world, man first had to conquer it.”
“Good lord,” I said—and nearly leaped up out of my chair while striking my brow and all the rest.
“Yes?”
“You hear this fifty times a day. You can turn on the radio or the television and hear it every hour. Man is conquering the deserts, man is conquering the oceans, man is conquering the atom, man is conquering the elements, man is conquering outer space.”
Ishmael smiled. “You didn’t believe me when I said that this story is ambient in your culture. Now you see what I mean. The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was
“Yes. That’s very clear now.”
5
“Now the first two parts of the story have come together: The world was made for man, and man was made to conquer and rule it. And how does the second part contribute to your explanation of
“Let me think about that…. Once again this is a sort of sneaky way of blaming the gods. They made the world for man, and they made man to conquer and rule it—which he eventually did. And this is how things came to be the way they are.”
“Nail it down. Go a little deeper.”
I closed my eyes and gave it a couple of minutes, but nothing came.
Ishmael nodded toward the windows. “All this—all your triumphs and tragedies, all your marvels and miseries—are a direct result of… what?”
I chewed on it for a while, but I still couldn’t see what he was getting at.
“Try it this way,” Ishmael said. “Things wouldn’t be the way they are if the gods had meant man to live like a lion or a wombat, would they?”
“No.”
“Man’s destiny was to conquer and rule the world. So things came to be this way as a direct result of… ?”
“Of man fulfilling his destiny.”
“Of course. And he
“Yes, absolutely.”
“So what is there to get excited about?”
“Very true, very true.”
“As the Takers see it, all this is simply the price of becoming human.”
“How do you mean?”
“It wasn’t possible to become fully human living beside the dragons in the slime, was it?”
“No.”
“In order to become fully human, man had to pull himself out of the slime. And all this is the result. As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory or a long, uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory.”
“Yes, that’s certainly how it’s understood. People just shrug and say, ‘Well, this is the price that had to be paid for indoor plumbing and central heating and air conditioning and automobiles and all the rest.’ ” I gave him a quizzical look. “And what are
“I’m saying that the price you’ve paid is not the price of becoming human. It’s not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It’s the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.”
FIVE
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