A sophomore in high school, I got my first job at a second-hand bookstore a few blocks west of the Northwestern University campus. I mainly dusted and straightened the innumerable old books of all sorts, took in money and made change, and cleaned up the place on Saturday mornings.
That last task was the vital one. The Friday afternoon meetings of the Northwestern philosophy faculty that the bookstore hosted had a way of extending late into the evening, fueled by whisky. The shop’s owner, an elfin Irishman named Robert Geary, participated, an honorary philosopher, in the Friday doings, and generally found it imperative to start his Saturday well after the shop was scheduled to open. So I became the official opener.
Those Friday afternoon gabfests inspired my lifelong distaste for philosophy, at least as it was then practiced in academic circles – and, for all I know, as it still is, undoubtedly with botoxian injections of Frenchified terminology. I rarely had any idea of what the various professors were going on about, often heatedly, but I got a pretty good idea of their characters, which were with rare exceptions arrogant, condescending and pretentious. I came to associate “philosophy” with these gents, and I decided it was spinach, and I decided to hell with it. When I read Gulliver a few years later, I recognized the Laputans, floating around above the ground arguing about abstract notions, as perfect representations of the philosophers I’d cleaned up after at the bookshop.
Ever since, I’ve strongly distrusted abstractions and preferred the concrete. I was happy when I found my preference shared by a Nobel physicist, Richard Feynman, who wrote, “I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I’m kind of slow and I don’t understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these ‘dumb’ questions.” To me, specific examples serve as the most reliable tests of abstract statements, and I’ve always preferred to start with the specifics and leave the generalizations to others.
So what in hell am I doing taking on the Problem of Evil?
The first answer to that is probably Making a Damn Fool of Myself, but the second is that I’m just watching a specific example go. In this case, the example is Herman Melville’s poem “The Maldive Shark.”
About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
How alert in attendance be.
From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw
They have nothing of harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before his Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In white triple tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril’s abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!
They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey,
Yet never partake of the treat—
Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,
Pale ravener of horrible meat.
Melville first published that poem in 1888, but he’d been thinking about sharks and pilot fish for a long time. In his 1849 novel Mardi, he wrote of both:
“To begin. There is the ordinary Brown Shark, or sea-attorney, so called by sailors; a grasping, rapacious varlet, that in spite of the hard knocks received from it, often snapped viciously at our steering oar. At times, these gentry swim in herds; especially about the remains of a slaughtered whale. They are the vultures of the deep.
“Then we often encountered the dandy Blue Shark, a long, taper and mighty genteel looking fellow, with a slender waist, like a Bond-street beau, and the whitest tiers of teeth imaginable. This dainty spark invariably lounged by with a careless fin and an indolent tail. But he looked infernally heartless.
“How his cold-blooded, gentlemanly air, contrasted with the rude, savage swagger of the Tiger Shark; a round, portly gourmand; with distended mouth and collapsed conscience, swimming about seeking whom he might devour. These gluttons are the scavengers of navies, following ships in the South Seas, picking up odds and ends of garbage, and sometimes a tit-bit, a stray sailor. No wonder, then, that sailors denounce them . . . .
“Yet this is all wrong. As well hate a seraph, as a shark. Both were made by the same hand. And that sharks are lovable, witness their domestic endearments. No Fury so ferocious, as not to have some amiable side. In the wild wilderness, a leopard mother caresses her cub, as Hagar did Ishmael; or a queen of France the dauphin. We know not what we do when we hate. . . .
In service to one such amiable monster, “His suite is composed of those dainty little creatures called Pilot fish by sailors . . . . Now the relation subsisting between the Pilot fish above mentioned and their huge ungainly lord, seems one of the most inscrutable things in nature. At any rate, it poses poor me to comprehend. That a monster so ferocious, should suffer five or six little sparks, hardly fourteen inches long, to gambol about his grim hull with the utmost impunity, is of itself something strange. But when it is considered, that by a reciprocal understanding, the Pilot fish seem to act as scouts to the shark, warning him of danger, and apprising him of the vicinity of prey; and moreover, in case of his being killed, evincing their anguish by certain agitations, otherwise inexplicable, the whole thing becomes a mystery unfathomable. Truly marvels abound . . . .”
Observers in Melville’s time were hard pressed to avoid the pathetic fallacy. Lacking computer power to analyze the observations newly made available by the remarkable advances in underwater photography of the past thirty years or so, they could do little but observe what behavior was observable (not much) and try to understand it in human terms. So sailors had long interpreted the shark/pilot fishes’ mutually beneficial relationship as a “friendship” – even the nickname “Pilot” resulted from sailors’ observations that the fish often followed ships in close to harbor, so the sailors concluded the fish were piloting them to shelter (presumably out of the goodness of their fishy hearts). Did Melville have human counterparts to his pilot fish in mind?
Writer Kathleen Rooney suggests that “‘The Maldive Shark’ affords an eerily prescient way of understanding the banality of evil in general and the perils of capitalism in particular . . . .” Melville was certainly alive to some of the “perils of capitalism,” insofar as the greed for individual monetary gain over any other value might have been thought peculiar to that economic system. In the last novel published during his lifetime, The Confidence Man, Melville created a veritable Canterbury Pilgrimage of con artists, illustrating at various levels of sophistication what P.T. Barnum discovered in his early clerkship at a country store: “‘It was ‘dog eat dog”‘ – ‘tit for tat.’ Our cottons were sold for wool, our wool and cotton for silk and linen; in fact nearly everything was different from what it was represented. The customers cheated us in their fabrics; we cheated the customers with our goods. Each party expected to be cheated, if it was possible. Our eyes, and not our ears, had to be our masters. We must believe little that we saw, and less that we heard. . . . Such a school would ‘cut eye-teeth,’ but if it did not cut conscience, morals, and integrity all up by the roots, it would be because the scholars quit before their education was completed.”
But Melville’s extensive reading would, I think, have prevented him from seeing the chicanery delineated in The Confidence Man as peculiar to his own country or its emerging economic religion. Ancient empires provided no end of examples of human sharks and pilot fish.
In the late days of the reign of Caesar Augustus, Tacitus reported, “So corrupted indeed and debased was that age by sycophancy that not only the foremost citizens who were forced to save their grandeur by servility, but every ex-consul, most of the ex-praetors and a host of inferior senators would rise in eager rivalry to propose shameful and preposterous motions.” Under Tiberius, Augustus’ eventual successor, Sejanus, a clever, ambitious angler, rose to power great enough to discomfit the Emperor, who arranged for Sejanus’ arrest, strangling, and the murder of his family and most of his adherents. “The political allies of Sejanus were ferreted out and denounced; some committed suicide, others were executed, while a few managed to escape unscathed by the honest admission that they had only connected themselves with Sejanus to advance their own careers” [my italics].
Wonderful to see that the Romans found this pilot fish excuse quite acceptable. It has remained so for succeeding millennia. Late in our own Gilded Age, Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley observed, “If ye’d turn on th’ gas in th’ darkest heart ye’d find it had a good raison for th’ worst things it done, a good varchous raison, like needin’ th’ money or punishin’ th’ wicked or tachin’ people a lesson to be more careful, or protectin’ th’ liberties iv mankind, or needin’ the money.” In most human societies we have recorded, we can find voracious, amoral alpha predators in power, alertly attended by servile toadies. Hard to believe the latter don’t all rationalize their service as Mr. Dooley describes. Or in the words of Doctor John’s “Such a Night”:
If I don’t do it, somebody else will.
If I don’t do it, somebody else will.
If I don’t do it, somebody else will.
If I don’t do it, somebody else will.
These ruminations give the pilot fish, the toadies of powerful humans, and the sharks and emperors they serve an aspect that doesn’t lend itself to any sort of easy moralizing. They lead, rather, to William Burroughs’ ironic question, “Wouldn’t you?”
Melville was well aware of the long history of human subservience to rapacious power – too aware, I think, to find it at all inscrutable. I think he was concerned with a greater mystery by 1888. In “The Maldive Shark,” the lovable, ungainly lord has lost whatever appeal he might have held for Melville and become an emotionless, monstrous “ravener of horrible meat.” But not just the shark has become more monstrous. That final adjective is the most telling, for it is the victim that’s composed of “horrible meat.” Finally, Melville has arrived at the conclusion, later reached by Conrad’s Kurtz, about the entire enterprise of life, and recoils in grief and disgust at the conditions of that life. He has reached the point of view expounded more than a century earlier by Voltaire’s scholar, Mr. Martin: “when I cast my eyes upon this globe . . . I cannot help thinking, that the Deity has abandoned it to some malignant being . . . . ”
Candide, still under the influence of Dr. Pangloss’ cosmic optimism, cannot accept that The Nature of Things is that everything preys on everything until it becomes prey itself. But late in his life, Melville came to see things this way, and was thrown into despairing revulsion. He had found that the answer to Blake’s question about another terrible predator – “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” – was, “Yup,” but he could not abide the cognitive dissonance that answer left him with, for, as Hawthorne observed, “He [could] neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.” If God, in other words, created a Life whose condition was inevitable, often violent, Death, such a God could hardly be praised or worshipped. But if this world is but an accidental “charnel of maw,” into which we all must pass, how can we bear our presence here? Are we not all – even the shark – reduced to pilot fish for Death and its insatiable appetite?
That’s one way to look at it, I suppose, and for those who embrace belief in some sort of fathomable Creator, Melville’s horror and rage seem a reasonable enough response. That Creator has, after all, created a sort of chamber of horrors, a cosmic joke, creating a passel of toys he can wind up and watch consume each other until their springs wind down or until they’re consumed by other, more efficiently voracious toys.
Melville’s characterizations of sharks and pilot fish could be read as examples of the pathetic fallacy. Indeed, before humans invented the sophisticated technologies that now allow us to perceive and record and study the actual behavior of other creatures, we could do little more than observe what behavior was observable (very little) and try to understand it in human terms. Those technologies have revealed that pilot fish accompany sharks to gain protection from other predators and to feed on the scraps of food that fall from the shark’ jaws. Sharks tolerate their pilot fish because they also feed on the sharks’ parasites and thereby keep the sharks free of infection and irritation. Win-win, as they say. Or would if fish could talk. Biologists call this a “mutualist” relationship. In the case of sharks and pilot fish, each gains from the other an improved chance of surviving long enough to pass on its genes to another generation.
Whatever pretensions or hopes we may have to rise above it, we remain a part of the natural world, and our pre-eminent drive and duty is no different. We will pretty much do whatever we need to do in service to that drive to survive and reproduce. I realize there are and have always been exceptions. We call them by various names – saints, heroes, lunatics – but the only name necessary is the one: Exceptions. The vast majority do not follow in those Exceptions’ various doomed footsteps. We like to imagine that this is not so, but it is so. Life first individuates, then the individual fights for its own survival, for only if the individual survives, at least long enough to reproduce, will its species survive. If that survival entails loss of or to other lives, well . . . .
In her great meditation Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard wrote, “Take just the top inch of soil, the world squirming right under my palms. In the top inch of forest soil, biologists found ‘an average of 1,356 living creatures present in each square foot . . . . Had an estimate also been made of the microscopic population, it might have ranged up to two billion bacteria and many millions of fungi, protozoa and algae – in a mere teaspoonful of soil.” Life on earth is limited by its presence on a finite globe, by its own fundamental, obsessive drive to live and reproduce itself. If even the microscopic population of bacteria – two billion per teaspoonful of soil – had been replicating itself (as bacteria do, every 20 to 60 minutes) for the 400 million years or so they’ve been here on earth, for example, would there be any room for any other life forms? Let’s see: 2,000,000,000 X 400,000,000 X 8,760 (hours in a year) = 70,080, 000,000,000,000,000. Seventy quintillion eighty quadrillion. That would be the number of bacteria in one teaspoonful of soil. How many teaspoonsful of soil would it take to cover one acre? There are about 15.7 billion acres of land on the planet. (Hint: that would be about 1,100,256,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bacteria. I think.)
Life, of course, is not limited to that flourishing underground. Dillard reminds us that “the landscape of earth is dotted and smeared with masses of apparently identical individual animals, from the great Pleistocene herds that blanketed grasslands to the gluey blobs of bacteria that clog the lobes of lungs. The oceanic breeding grounds of pelagic birds are as teeming and cluttered as any human Calcutta. Lemmings blacken the earth and locusts the air. Grunion run thick in the ocean, corals pile on pile, and protozoans explode in a red tide stain. Ants take to the skies in swarms, mayflies hatch by the millions, and molting cicadas coat the trunks of trees.” How long would it have taken the weight of all this accumulating life to send its host planet plummeting out of its orbit and into the sun? Well, you do the math. The terms are clear.
Those terms, as put by Dillard: “”That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it, fired into it, a blue streak of nonbeing, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agreed to the very compromising terms that are the only ones that being offers . . . . if you want to live, you have to die.”
Those who don’t harbor the notions that there must have been a conscious Creator and that we are in a position to fathom such a Creator’s nature or intentions, though, can accept the terms of Life, including its temporal limitation, as did, for example, Sara Teasdale in her “September Day – Pont de Neuilly”:
The Seine flows out of the mist
And into the mist again;
The trees lean over the water,
The small leaves fall like rain.
The leaves fall patiently
Nothing remembers or grieves;
The river takes to the sea
The yellow drift of the leaves.
Milky and cold is the air,
The leaves float with the stream,
The river comes out of a sleep
And goes away in a dream.
Others have gone even further, not just accepting but embracing and celebrating the conditions of life, even at their direst (the poisoned fox, the heedlessly crushed turtle) and the scavengers who help maintain those conditions, as does David Bottoms:
Under the Vulture Tree
for Mary Oliver
We have all seen them circling pastures,
have looked up from the mouth of a barn, a pine clearing,
the fences of our own back yards, and have stood
amazed by the one slow wing beat, the endless dihedral drift.
But I had never seen so many so close,
hundreds, every limb of the dead oak feathered black,
and I cut the engine, let the river grab the boat
and pull it toward the tree.
The black leaves shined, the pale fruit blossomed
red, ugly as a human heart.
Then, as I passed under their dream, I saw for the first time
its soft countenance, the raw fleshy jowls
wrinkled and generous, like the faces
of the very old who have learned to empathize with everything.
And I drifted away from them slow, on the pull of the river,
reluctant, looking back at their roost,
calling them what I’d never called them, what they are,
those dwarfed transfiguring angels,
who flock to the side of the poisoned fox, the mud turtle
crushed on the shoulder of the road,
who pray over the leaf-graves of the anonymous lost,
with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings.
Well, as Jake said to Lady Brett, “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?” However we may philosophize, when death strikes some individual human or animal dear to us, we grieve. When I consider the death of that invaluable, irreplaceable member of my own species, myself, I grieve. I don’t wanna go to bed.
But finally, even Melville found acceptance for the terms of life. In “Pontoosuc” (named for a lake in the Berkshires), Melville begins by contemplating a placid autumn landscape, but his pleasure in this Arcadian prospect is soon interrupted by the realization that it will perish, as it always has done before.
Crowning a bluff where gleams the lake below,
Some pillared pines in well-spaced order stand
And like an open temple show.
And here in best of season bland;
Autumnal non-tide, I look out
From dusk arcades on sunshine all about.
Beyond the Lake, in upland cheer
Fields, pastoral fields and barns appear,
They skirt the hills where lonely roads
Revealed in links thro’ tiers of woods
Wind up to indistinct abodes
And faery-people neighborhoods;
While further fainter mountains keep
Hazed in romance impenetrably deep.
Look, corn in stacks, on many a farm,
And orchards ripe in languorous charm,
as dreamy Nature, feeling sure
Of all her genial labor done,
And the last mellow fruitage own,
Would idle out her term mature;
Reposing like a thing reclined
In kinship with man’s meditative mind.
For me, within the brown arcade –
Rich life, methought; sweet here in shade
And pleasant abroad in air! – But, nay,
A counter thought intrusive played,
A thought as old as thought itself,
And who shall lay it on the shelf! –
I felt the beauty bless the day
In opulence of autumn’s dower;
But evanescence will not stay!
A year ago was such an hour,
As this, which but foreruns the blast
Shall sweep these live leaves to the dead leaves past.
All dies! –
I stood in revery long.
Then, to forget death’s ancient wrong,
I turned me in the deep arcade,
And there by chance in lateral glade
I saw low tawny mounds in lines
Relics of trunks of stately pines
Ranked erst in colonnades where, lo!
Erect succeeding pillars show!
All dies! and not alone
The aspiring trees and men and grass;
The poet’s forms of beauty pass,
And noblest deeds they are undone
Even truth itself decays, and lo,
From truth’s sad ashes fraud and falsehood grow.
All dies!
The workman dies, and after him, the work;
Like to these pine whose graves I trace,
Statue and statuary fall upon their face:
In very amaranths the worm doth lurk,
Even stars, Chaldeans say, have left their place.
Andes and Apalachee tell
Of havoc ere our Adam fell,
And present Nature as a moss doth show
On the ruins of the Nature of the aeons of long ago.
All is vanity, then. But a most un-Melvillean spirit appears to him, urging him to understand that while all, indeed, dies, death is merely preparation for life’s renewal, an endless cycle that renders death essentially meaningless:
But look – and hark!
Adown the glade,
Where light and shadow sport at will,
Who cometh vocal, and arrayed
As in the first pale tints of morn –
So pure, rose-clear, and fresh and chill!
Some ground-pine springs her brow adorn,
The earthy rootless tangled slinging.
Over tufts of moss which dead things made,
Under vital twigs which danced or swayed,
Along she floats, and lightly singing:
“Dies, all dies!
The grass it dies, but in vernal rain
Up it springs and lives again;
Over and over, again and again
It lives, it dies, and it lives again.
Who sighs that all dies?
Summer and winter, and pleasure and pain
And everything everywhere in God’s reign,
They end, and anon they begin again:
Wane and wax, wax and wane:
Over and over and over amain
End, ever end, and begin again
End, ever end, and forever and ever begin again!”
She ceased, and nearer slid, and hung
In dewy guise; then softlier sung:
“Since light and shade are equal set
And all revolves, nor more ye know;
Ah, why should tears the pale cheek fret
For aught that waneth here below.
Let go, Let go!”
With that, her warm lips thrilled me through,
She kissed me, while her chaplet cold
Its rootlets brushed against my brow,
With all their humid clinging mould.
She vanished, leaving fragrant breath
And warmth and chill of wedded life and death.
If individual life requires an unquenchable desire to continue living from each individual, this does not demand, as so many after Darwin have assumed, that living individuals must compete with each other to the death. Hobbes’ “state of nature” asserted such a grim scenario, and certainly nature provides plenty of evidence that it operates on the principle “eat or be eaten.” But, as we’ve learned to observe the natural world more deeply and completely, we’ve learned that nature provides plenty of evidence that it operates in other ways as well, that cooperation and empathy may be as or more effective aids to survival than the swiftest, sharpest savagery.
In a profile of lifelong forester Peter Wohlleben, Smithsonian Magazine pointed out that, “Since Darwin, we have generally thought of trees as striving, disconnected loners, competing for water, nutrients and sunlight, with the winners shading out the losers and sucking them dry. The timber industry in particular sees forests as wood-producing systems and battlegrounds for survival of the fittest.
“There is now a substantial body of scientific evidence that refutes that idea. It shows instead that trees of the same species are communal, and will often form alliances with trees of other species. Forest trees have evolved to live in cooperative, interdependent relationships, maintained by communication and a collective intelligence similar to an insect colony. These soaring columns of living wood draw the eye upward to their outspreading crowns, but the real action is taking place underground, just a few inches below our feet.
“‘Some are calling it the ‘wood-wide web,’ says [forester Peter] Wohlleben in German-accented English. ‘All the trees here, and in every forest that is not too damaged, are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. Trees share water and nutrients through the networks, and also use them to communicate. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages.’”
“Scientists call these mycorrhizal networks. The fine, hairlike root tips of trees join together with microscopic fungal filaments to form the basic links of the network, which appears to operate as a symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, or perhaps an economic exchange. As a kind of fee for services, the fungi consume about 30 percent of the sugar that trees photosynthesize from sunlight. The sugar is what fuels the fungi, as they scavenge the soil for nitrogen, phosphorus and other mineral nutrients, which are then absorbed and consumed by the trees.”
Such cooperation and mutual aid is not confined to the vegetable world. In his book The Inner Lives of Animals, Wohlebben cites research on vampire bats – hardly a species we’d naturally suspect of altruism: “If they’re going to eat their fill . . . they need experience and luck when it comes to finding cattle and making sure their victims don’t move. Unlucky or inexperienced bats often go hungry, but only until their well-fed colleagues return to the cave. Here, the successful bats regurgitate part of their meal of blood for their less fortunate cave mates, so they all get to share in the meal . . . . Surprisingly enough, it is not only close family members that get to eat, but also other bats not even distantly related to the one dispensing food . . . . Clearly the bats have a choice – free will – and they can decide to share or not to share . . . . ”
Mutuality is not confined to bats – Wohlebben cites research at the wonderfully named Swine Institute in Holland clearly demonstrating that pigs empathize with each others’ emotions. Nor is it confined within species: “A particularly moving example that animals, too, are capable of empathy across species lines comes from the Budapest Zoo. Zoo visitor Aleksander Medves was filming the brown bear in its enclosure when suddenly, a crow fell into the moat. The bird began to weaken as it thrashed about and was in danger of drowning, when the bear intervened. It carefully took one of the bird’s feathers in its mouth and pulled the bird back to land. The bird lay there as though petrified before it pulled itself together. The bear took no more notice of this fresh morsel of meat, which was definitely a potential prey item. Instead, it turned its attention once more to its meal of vegetables. Accident? Why would the bear do such a thing when it clearly had nothing to do with either the urge to eat or the urge to play?”
In Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville, Stephen Jay Goud observed that “The vertebrate brain works primarily as a device tuned to the recognition of patterns. When evolution grafted consciousness in human form upon this organ in a single species, the old inherent search for patterns developed into a propensity for organizing these patterns as stories, and then for explaining the surrounding world in terms of the narratives expressed in these tales . . . humans tend to construct their stories along a limited number of themes and pathways, favored because they grant both useful sense and satisfying meaning to the confusion (and often to the tragedy) of life in our complex surrounding world.”
Apostles of the religion of Free Market Capitalism, often known as Social Darwinists, insist that humans are motivated exclusively by individual self-interest, that human life is only accurately described as All Against All. They tell and re-tell and finance the promulgation of that particular story. Its appeal has been clear not only to novelists and screenplay writers, but to most writers of history. Conflict, slaughter, and hatred seem to offer remarkably satisfying “themes and pathways” to those who entertain and instruct us as we sit around the campfire. Yet viewing history through this thematic lens leaves out a very great deal of actual human behavior, as Will Durant noted in The History of Civilization:
“Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts – between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love. History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.”
If the pale ravener must get us all, as he must, we are under no obligation to serve him until we are served to him. If the price of admission to life is that we must die, that everything and everyone we love must die, that’s a steep price, but, for the life we are given, in physical form on a finite planet, it seems evident that it’s a necessary price. if to enjoy rich life we must face its inevitable ending, we may grieve, but we can hardly complain. Until that ending, each individual has the choice of serving the interests of the contemporary incarnation of the pale ravener or of serving the lives of others, as well as of his or her own.
