Just To Be Human
The three books I've recently read are not three I would have picked out for their thematic similarities. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known epic poem that chronicles the adventures of the heroic king of Uruk, The World Without Us, an alternatingly hopeful and heart-breaking thought experiment which illustrates the impact of our species by imagining what would happen if we suddenly disappeared, and Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's poetic novel (if you can even call it that) that was considered so obscene when he wrote it that it was banned for twenty seven years.
Yet there is something, a theme perhaps, that ties them together. But this is not an English paper, thank God, so I am not going to be an academic about it.
In Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, who is part god, meets Enkidu, a man who grew up in the wilderness among wild animals. They become best friends, and go on so adventures, one of which is to seek out the giant/monster Humbaba and destroy him. Humbaba is the keeper of a great cedar forest. After Gilgamesh gets the upper hand, Humbaba pleads for mercy, but Enkidu convinces Gilgamesh to kill him anyway. Though Gilgamesh has one god on his side during his mission, he doesn't have the entire pantheon rooting for him; after he kills Humbaba and destroys a bunch of his trees and takes his "seven splendors, another god, Enlil, gets royally pissed off about the whole thing. Enlil curses them and gives the seven splendors, whatever they are, to some other entities. Later on, Enkidu has dreams that the gods are going to punish him for convincing Gilgamesh to kill the keeper of the forest, and he subsequently sickens and dies. This prompts Gilgamesh, in essence, to do a little soul searching. This, in classic-epic style, involves going to the underworld and visiting the sage on an island at the edge of the world. The sage tells him, basically, "Get over yourself! you're going to die too. And by the way, let me tell you about the flood." Then he describes what is essentially the Noah and the Ark story, and Gilgamesh goes home.
The Flood story, in Gilgamesh at least (I can't vouch for the Bible) is prefaced by the unmendable sins of humanity piling up to such an extend that the Gods have no other solution than to wash them away and start over from scratch. So fair warning is given to one man, and he builds a boat and saves all the animals, and everything starts over.
Floods, needless to say, have a potential role to play in our hopefully-not-too-near future. But it's not just rising sea levels, or immense weather patterns bringing torrential rains to areas that can't drain it. New York city, for example, wouldn't fare well if humans left it. Though its surface streets are all above sea level, much of the infrastructure that holds them up is not. The subways only stay dry because the pumping stations keep them that way. With no humans to keep the pumps working and the power grid functioning, the subways would fill with water, which would wreak havoc with the steel beams that hold up much of the city above. It's only interesting that one of our most audacious cities is one which could suffer the soonest if all of us up and left.
Tropic of Cancer is difficult to sum up or categorize, and there's no real plot to outline. Basically it's a train-of-thought exultation and condemnation of life in Paris in the 30's, which doesn't appear to have any specific point other than not having a specific point. And yet, in spite of what I'm sure were Henry Miller's best efforts, a greater meaning does seep out between the lines of his poetically sordid prose, and it says, "Our hubris and materialism is killing us. Get over yourselves, and stop looking for miracles, but don't despair." Or.... something like that. Generally anything in this book is open to debate because he doesn't suggest one theme but that he later suggests its opposite. And yet there are a few passages which seem unequivocal:
"India's enemy is not England, but America... Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of Doom. It will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit."
Anyway, I suppose it's a long shot, but there's something about the arrogance of our civilization in all these books. I mean, The World is a book about the environment and how much better it would be if we weren't in it. And the book doesn't go into it but there's definitely an arrogance in the creation of technology (playing god), the "ownership" of land, and the sense that our needs are more important than other creatures'. Gilgamesh is a book about an arrogant warrior who's rebuked for his pillaging of nature, a demi-god who's best friend, a wild-man, is taken from him because of it... I mean, come on, and who is told by the wise man to chill the fuck out, and enjoy life. And Tropic of Cancer is about nothing at all, but it sure has a anti-industrial-revolution-spawned-consumer-culture-we-are-the-apocalypse bent; and as far as arrogance, it seems to me at least that the characters whom he describes with the least respect are the ones who put on airs, or are pompous or full of themselves.
Incidentally, I also recently reread The Great Gatsby. And I could draw similarities between it and Tropic of Cancer but I'm not going to bother.
Yet there is something, a theme perhaps, that ties them together. But this is not an English paper, thank God, so I am not going to be an academic about it.
In Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, who is part god, meets Enkidu, a man who grew up in the wilderness among wild animals. They become best friends, and go on so adventures, one of which is to seek out the giant/monster Humbaba and destroy him. Humbaba is the keeper of a great cedar forest. After Gilgamesh gets the upper hand, Humbaba pleads for mercy, but Enkidu convinces Gilgamesh to kill him anyway. Though Gilgamesh has one god on his side during his mission, he doesn't have the entire pantheon rooting for him; after he kills Humbaba and destroys a bunch of his trees and takes his "seven splendors, another god, Enlil, gets royally pissed off about the whole thing. Enlil curses them and gives the seven splendors, whatever they are, to some other entities. Later on, Enkidu has dreams that the gods are going to punish him for convincing Gilgamesh to kill the keeper of the forest, and he subsequently sickens and dies. This prompts Gilgamesh, in essence, to do a little soul searching. This, in classic-epic style, involves going to the underworld and visiting the sage on an island at the edge of the world. The sage tells him, basically, "Get over yourself! you're going to die too. And by the way, let me tell you about the flood." Then he describes what is essentially the Noah and the Ark story, and Gilgamesh goes home.
The Flood story, in Gilgamesh at least (I can't vouch for the Bible) is prefaced by the unmendable sins of humanity piling up to such an extend that the Gods have no other solution than to wash them away and start over from scratch. So fair warning is given to one man, and he builds a boat and saves all the animals, and everything starts over.
Floods, needless to say, have a potential role to play in our hopefully-not-too-near future. But it's not just rising sea levels, or immense weather patterns bringing torrential rains to areas that can't drain it. New York city, for example, wouldn't fare well if humans left it. Though its surface streets are all above sea level, much of the infrastructure that holds them up is not. The subways only stay dry because the pumping stations keep them that way. With no humans to keep the pumps working and the power grid functioning, the subways would fill with water, which would wreak havoc with the steel beams that hold up much of the city above. It's only interesting that one of our most audacious cities is one which could suffer the soonest if all of us up and left.
Tropic of Cancer is difficult to sum up or categorize, and there's no real plot to outline. Basically it's a train-of-thought exultation and condemnation of life in Paris in the 30's, which doesn't appear to have any specific point other than not having a specific point. And yet, in spite of what I'm sure were Henry Miller's best efforts, a greater meaning does seep out between the lines of his poetically sordid prose, and it says, "Our hubris and materialism is killing us. Get over yourselves, and stop looking for miracles, but don't despair." Or.... something like that. Generally anything in this book is open to debate because he doesn't suggest one theme but that he later suggests its opposite. And yet there are a few passages which seem unequivocal:
"India's enemy is not England, but America... Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of Doom. It will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit."
Anyway, I suppose it's a long shot, but there's something about the arrogance of our civilization in all these books. I mean, The World is a book about the environment and how much better it would be if we weren't in it. And the book doesn't go into it but there's definitely an arrogance in the creation of technology (playing god), the "ownership" of land, and the sense that our needs are more important than other creatures'. Gilgamesh is a book about an arrogant warrior who's rebuked for his pillaging of nature, a demi-god who's best friend, a wild-man, is taken from him because of it... I mean, come on, and who is told by the wise man to chill the fuck out, and enjoy life. And Tropic of Cancer is about nothing at all, but it sure has a anti-industrial-revolution-spawned-consumer-culture-we-are-the-apocalypse bent; and as far as arrogance, it seems to me at least that the characters whom he describes with the least respect are the ones who put on airs, or are pompous or full of themselves.
Incidentally, I also recently reread The Great Gatsby. And I could draw similarities between it and Tropic of Cancer but I'm not going to bother.