Essays in Idleness

Thanks are usually given for something positive, not something negative, like not being a toad, or not being a woman. This is because we live within limited perspectives. We cannot really know how joyful and satisfying it might be, to hop with the Bufonidae, especially the female ones, covered with gorgeous, wart-like bumps above their paratoid glands, secreting neurotoxins. Indeed, no one could want to eat us, were we a toad.

But the toads must have their own prayers of thanksgiving, that we know nothing of, and having avoided the scandal of humanity, must pray with every heartbeat. It is a permanent thanksgiving for them. So, I came to think long ago, through all nature. The animals are joyful from the moment of their creation, to the moment of their cessation, in the wild. Grim humans assume that they feel pain and other inconveniences as we do. But I had it on authority of my balconata finches (who did not return after works on my building) that life is one long continuous feast and adventure.

In particular, they do not experience fear as we do. A fright to them is a delicious thrill, as it can be sometimes to us watching movies. Death, to them, is incomprehensible. For all we know, they are immortal by way of “metempsychosis.” Their souls transmigrate.

They will be reborn as other finches, or perhaps may slightly “evolve.” For as nature abhors a vacuum, so too does the spirit of life refuse the blankness of extermination. It pops up somewhere else.

No animal is capable of despair, I think. Humans alone are “deep” enough to approach the proximity of Hell, in their free will. And yet we need not go there; it is up to us.