Essays in Idleness

I have fallen in love with Sophie Cunningham, even though she is a basketball star (I loathe basketball), and more than six feet tall (which is surely excessive, for a girl). She excels also in every other sport, beats the boys when they let her play with them, and can dance and sing and drink. Alas, I wouldn’t stand a chance with her, for I understand that she despises shorter men. (But politely.)

Sophie is fearless, and honest, and true, as everyone must have noticed by now. Yet as magnificently as she may sing “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue,” in Mizzou or wherever she came from, she is quite thrillingly, remarkably non-violent. And yet she plays for Idaho in the women’s professional basketball league. Or maybe it is Indiana.

Well, something that starts with “I.” This is a bloodsport, in which the women are all trying to kill one another.

It is that way throughout women’s athletics. For instance, though only if you have the stomach for it, I invite you to check out women’s field hockey. The girls are vicious, wherever they are playing — in Canada, England, Holland, Italy, Pakistan. Put a stick in a woman’s hands and, regardless of her ethnicity, she will immediately try to clobber another woman. I have seen this with my own eyes in each of these countries.

As Stephen Leacock wrote, men may be too crooked even for business; but women are, even for war, too violent.

My mysterious South Australian correspondent, writing from a location precisely north of the absolute South Pole, shares these comments from the esteemed Friedrich Nietzsche:

“Modern, noisy, time-consuming, proud industriousness has extinguished the religious instincts, so that people no longer have any idea of what religions are about and, as it were, just register their presence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement. …

“How much naivety — venerable, childlike, and boundlessly stupid naivety — there is in the scholar’s belief in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the simple unsuspecting certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as an inferior and lower type which he himself has grown beyond and above. … ”

This is from the 58th aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil, which began with a defence of idleness. How merrily he kicks away “the little presumptuous dwarf, and man of the mob, the brisk handyman of ideas, … of modern ideas!”

Grouse are “adapted” not merely to an environment, but also to being grouse. There is something remarkably grouse-like in their overall design, many constituent parts, and in each of their responses to stimuli. They even seem to know that they are grouse; to be contented with that identity, willing to live and even die in the condition of being grouse.

One may make no sense whatever if one takes them to be something else. They will persist in being grouse-like, and in point of fact grouse, even if we try to persuade them that they are cockatoos.

Some other creature may invade their peculiar environmental niche; might even do so successfully. The grouse will respond to that invasion implacably, as grouse. They will under no circumstances attempt to transform or metamorphose themselves in reaction to such an existential crisis. Indeed, they will not consider such a proposition. It is always strictly fight or flight, on unambiguously grouse terms.

They will, if shot by a hunter, even taste like grouse.

Should they flee, it will be to the sort of territory that they find agreeable to themselves, as grouse. They will even go in search of such locations, should that prove necessary. But finding no such territory, they would frankly rather starve than cease being grouse.

It would take a miracle for a grouse to develop or “evolve” some new characteristic. For as I’ve said, it would never occur to the grouse themselves. More likely it would occur to the Grouse Angel — the being assigned by God to look out for grouse interests. Yet even in such a case, the new character would emerge from the underlying grouse-ness of the former character, and appear as an extension of the grouse repertoire. It would be all of a piece with their ontology.