All the Same

What do I think about this? I thought to myself as I softly closed Life of Pi. (You can think softly, you know. Softly.)

What does this mean? I contemplated slowly, almost lazily but more carefully, rolling the thoughts around in my head like soft, sticky dough through my hands, smoothing out the edges of my thoughts.

BAM

I smashed the dough.

http://www.woodstone-corp.com/images/food/naples/nap_dough_finished_lg.jpg

I don't know what I think. I feel like something very important just happened and I missed it, sort of, the importance of it. What I feel is...

Anger. I feel angry at Mr. Chiba and Mr. Okamoto because they missed it, somehow. Like me, but worse. I missed it because it's behind a veil, and hopefully, soon, by the end of tonight or by the end of this week, I'll get it. (I will get it, won't I?). They missed it because they pushed it away, and as Pi patiently told them his story, as the truth of the story seeped through the cracks of reality, they worried about cookies and lunch and long drives.

OK. What am I trying to say here? Enough with the confusing cryptic crap. My writing is starting to sound ridiculous. Say what you mean, mean what you say (I heard that somewhere, once.)

This is what I say:

I say that it doesn't matter whether Richard Parker was there. I say it doesn't matter whether it was a hyena or a "mean and muscular" (389) cook, a young sailor who "broke his leg jumping from the ship" (382) or a zebra, a mother or Orange Juice. It doesn't matter.

This is what I mean:

I mean that it doesn't matter because IT'S ALL THE SAME. Look. LOOK. This is what I mean. I mean that, as Pi told the two idiots who interviewed him, "in both stories the ship sinks, [his] entire family dies, and [he] suffers." Both stories are horrible. In both cases, Pi learns about love, and sacrifice, and danger. In both cases, Pi ends up an orphan. I'm looking here for the fundamental difference between the stories, aren't I?

Lets try to make what I say and what I mean false. The stories are not the same. OK. They're different. How are they different?

Well. One is about animals, right? Genius, Lauren. Please continue. We're rivetted, really we are.

Why would one story being about animals matter? We talked in class about how survival, and the will to survive, is overwhelming. We talked about hearts beating after all hope has been lost, about men cutting off their arms or drinking water from elephant dung. We talked about how when you're fighting for survival, there's no telling what you would do. And what I noticed in Life of Pi is that as things got worse, Pi resembled an animal, something wild and untamed, more and more. "Nature '[staged] a comeback'" (anthology, 26)

What makes us human? We talked about empathy, right? But I feel like we have all these social conventions and human things that ensure that empathy will be at its utmost level of possibleness. Like we eat at a table, and we buy food in perfectly packaged containers from the super market. We go swimming but only when there are lifeguards present. We turn on the air conditioning in the summer. Empathy is so easy when you're comfortable and safe and unafraid.

supermarkets vs...

http://en.showchina.org/Features/30years/200812/W020081216486927613535.jpg

hunting for survival

http://papercastlepress.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/african_lion_hunting1.jpg

Animals don't always have that. Or they haven't figure it out yet, havent' been able to reach the same level of safeness as us. So it's easier for them, I think, to forget their empathy, which I am certain they posses. Look what happened when Pi (and if you're believing the second story, the french cook as well) has to fight for survival. In the animals story he kills fish. He sucks turtles dry of blood. In the second he kills a man, a man who first killed both a woman and a man.

All of this, all this killing, was about survival, something that animals grapple with daily and humans barely think about except when put in situations where survival is at risk.

So yes. The stories are different. But they are also THE SAME. I think that man, when fighting for survival, becomes animal. So whether you believe the first story or the second, you have to know that in both stories, Pi was stranded with a bunch of animals, including himself.

And as for this being a story that makes you believe in God... I don't know. I think that more in making me believe in God, it made me see the connection between humans and everything else. So if God is about unity, then yes. It made me believe.