We Used to Count Ourselves Kings of Infinite Space
Animals, the Environment, and the Limits of Empathy
On a honeymoon safari in Tanzania two years ago, as my husband slept off a cold he caught on the plane, I spent fireside nights listening to lions roar and reading Out of Africa. This “lyrical meditation” by the Danish author Karen Blixen, writing under the name Isak Dinesen, looks back on her struggle to start a coffee plantation in early twentieth-century Kenya. The farm’s gradual failure, as her marriage and her lover’s Gipsy Moth biplane went up in flames, ultimately forced Blixen back to Europe. She’d spend the rest of her life longing for Africa, wasting away of syphilis and self-starvation, and writing.
I see in Blixen a fellow (crypto-)classicist, in temperament if not in training. Much like classical studies, she’s often maddeningly unaware of her own colonialism. But I love her writing for its flickering vision of a timeless, transformative world beyond our modern confines. “The views were immensely wide,” Blixen writes of her lost empire without end.“Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility. … Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.”
These words lionize not just Africa but the past as a place to journey, where spatial mobility and spiritual elevation thrive in interconnected, privileged glory. And they keep running through my head as I survey the sectional sofa where I’m social-distancing for the sixth week in a row, wondering when this agonizing now will be over, what future awaits, and what will be lost.
Last month, the world was a bigger place, with larger air and nobler views. The month before, I was in Africa. Now the walls are closing in. I’m nostalgic not just for open vistas, the sociable buzz of bars and cafés, conversations about anything other than coronavirus, but for things I never thought I’d miss: taking the bus, airport security, the ability to change scenes at will.
At our distance from British East Africa, it’s easy to link Blixen’s sense of “belonging” with white entitlement and ownership; her feeling of “being at home” with the displacement of native Kikuyu from their land; her “nobility” and “assurance” with the purchased privilege of playing baroness over this captive population. Among the many seductive qualities of Out of Africa is its theft of empathy. We see events from Blixen’s eyes, share the tragedy of her lost land and livelihood, not the thousand prior tragedies on which it depended.
Many classicists, of course, are keenly aware of such biases and working to retell “Great Man” histories with more thought for the shoulders they stood on. But what about the stories that we star in? Those of us lucky enough to be sheltering at home this Earth Day may be pacing our cages like Rilke’s panther, focused on the thousand bars that contain us. As I miss the world I used to know, I wonder if what I’m really missing is the sense the world was mine.
Will this confinement finally teach us — by which I mean me, as a means of imagining you — to recognize that our freedoms and pleasures are based, like Blixen’s, on the subservience of others? On people abroad and at home who make our masks, pack our meat, staff our parks, and drive our buses with little safety or security? Do we finally feel sorry for them now because we feel sorry for ourselves and what we’ve lost?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this pandemic, it’s that freedoms I took for granted were always luxuries. Like the wild gazelle that briefly graced Blixen’s house with her presence, then one day just as capriciously vanished, freedoms aren’t possessions. They come and go at will.
The poster child for my past-imperfect privilege to roam is a toy giraffe named Zebulon. When my husband couldn’t join me on trips, I’d text him shots of Zebby against plane windows, airport bars, postcard backdrops: a plastic proxy for my selfie-hating self, to show I was thinking of him across the globe.
More apt for the moment is the pair of giraffes Blixen describes in Shadows on the Grass, bound by ship for a German zoo. Their delicate heads poke out from the crate where they can barely stand, swaying in surprise at the sea:
The world had suddenly shrunk, changed and closed round them. They could not know or imagine the degradation to which they were sailing. For they were proud and innocent creatures, gentle amblers of the great plains; they had not the least knowledge of captivity, cold, stench, smoke, and mange, nor of the terrible boredom in a world in which nothing is ever happening. …
In the long years before them, will the Giraffes sometimes dream of their lost country? Where are they now, where have they gone to, the grass and the thorn-trees, the rivers and water-holes and the blue mountains? The high sweet air over the plains has lifted and withdrawn. Where have the other Giraffes gone [that cantered by their side] over the undulating land? They have left them, they have all gone, and it seems that they are never coming back.
In the night where is the full moon?
Like Achilles and Priam weeping together for their separate misfortunes, like the Roman plebs’ outrage with Pompey for making elephants fight, Blixen’s empathy for these giraffes is really self-pity: for the beloved way of life, the high heart and air, that she too was soon to lose on her homeward journey to Denmark. And it’s because she wants liberty that she wishes them death:
Good-bye, good-bye, I wish for you that you may die on the journey, both of you, so that not one of the little noble heads, that are now raised, surprised, over the edge of the case, against the blue sky of Mombasa, shall be left to turn from one side to the other, all alone, in Hamburg, where no one knows of Africa.
In the emotive cage of this text, no less than the stinking menagerie, these giraffes are sacrificial victims to human ego.
I’ve often told my students that classics is a cure for what Barack Obama diagnosed as an “empathy deficit — the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us.” But I’m beginning to wonder what we’re really doing when we feel others’ pain. Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has argued that empathy can cause us to over-identify with individuals at the collective’s expense, reinforce our biases and cloud rational decision-making. Alisha Gaines, author of Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy, documents Grace Halsell’s imposture as a black woman in 1968 Mississippi. “But if she can’t find the exact facsimile of herself in the black women that she’s meeting,” Gaines explains, then Halsell “dismisses and judges them for not being the idea of a black woman that she has already constructed.” Surely recognizing our distance and reaching across it — suffering with others, rather than pouring our emotions into them — beats wearing race as a costume, or empathy as a cloak for self-affirmation.
As we while away these hours in captivity, can we check not just our temperatures but our compassion? Why did so many Americans ignore the global suffering caused by this “foreign virus” until we realized that its victims could look like us? Why do we wring our hands on social media about friends and relatives in hot spots across the country, but stand by as our Asian neighbors and nurses are harassed? Even news stories on tigers with coronavirus pounce quickly on the self-interested question of whether our cats can get sick, too. (Answer: yes, they can.) Are we so bounded in our nutshells that we can care for others only as proxies for ourselves?
Hello again, and welcome, dear giraffes, in whom we too readily see ourselves: rounded up from the open spaces where we once shook hands and socialized without care, now shut up in our crates, gasping for air, foraging from pantries and freezers, borne inexorably through monotony toward a terrifying unknown. I wish that we may not die on this journey. I wish against hope that it may teach our species a truer compassion.
In ancient India, sympathy across species was the origin of poetry. Mira Seo tells me it all began with the murder of a bird. (I’d like to think was a crane, and yes, I’m projecting.)
[A] holy man saw an inseparable pair of sweet-voiced krauñcha birds wandering about. But even as he watched, a Nishada hunter, filled with malice and intent on mischief, struck down the male of the pair. Seeing him struck down and writhing on the ground, his body covered with blood, his mate uttered a piteous cry. And the pious seer, seeing the bird struck down in this fashion by the Nishada, was filled with pity.
Then, in the intensity of this feeling of compassion, the brahman thought, “This is wrong.” Hearing the krauñcha hen wailing, he uttered these words: “Since, Nishida, you killed one of this pair of krauñchas, distracted at the height of passion, you shall not live for very long.” And even as he stood watching and spoke in this way, this thought arose in his heart, “Stricken with grief for this bird, what is this I have uttered?”
What he has uttered is the first metrical verse, building deep into Sanskrit literature a link between shoka, grief, and shloka, poetry. The question is: whose grief, whose poetry?
I wish the brahman’s lament for the bird portended harmony among species. But it’s equally a curse against the hunter who caused this misery. And the brahman immediately starts admiring his own ingenuity, coopting the bird’s grief into a paean to his empathy: patient zero for that modern pathology of being more-woke-than-thou.
We’ve all been (rightly) talking about how art and the humanities are helping us through this isolation, helping recenter our selves within the terrifying crush of statistics and projections. But there’s a danger that all this media, dished up to our homes on pixellated platters, is domesticating our desire to journey beyond ourselves. It’s so easy to recline on our couches while faces on TV feed us grapes of (self-)regard, to “feel” our friends’ pain with emojis and eat the processed carbs of our personalized news feeds. Is it time to go paleo, get off our emotional asses, track tragedy bleeding through the bush?
In another perverse communion with nature, Karen Blixen writes:
The hunter is in love with the game, real hunters are true animal lovers. A lion-hunt each single time is an affair of perfect harmony, of deep, burning, mutual desire and reverence between two truthful and undaunted creatures, on the same wave-length. A lion on the plain bears a greater likeness to ancient monumental stone lions than to the lion which to-day you see in a zoo; the sight of him goes straight to the heart. Dante cannot have been more deeply amazed and moved at the first sight of Beatrice in a street of Florence.
At first, I found Blixen’s fascination with the past hard to square with her rejection of the cramped drawing-rooms of Europe. She gestures toward Africa’s grandeur by way of ancient art; she asks Denys Finch Hatton to teach her “Latin, and to read the Bible, and the Greek poets.” Now I see that antiquity, like British East Africa, offered Blixen more than illusions of eternity and greatness of heart. It unfurled a vaster canvas on which to write her story and feel that vertiginous sense of insignificance we call the Sublime.
Those of us forced to teach online are now quite literally trying to bring classics to where our students live. But I wonder if our well-intentioned attempts to make classics “relatable” are the equivalent of translating tigers into housecats. I wonder what would happen if we stopped pitching the Greeks and Romans as “just like us,” and learn to love them as Blixen loved the lion: because they’ll never love us back, because they’ll never belong to us, because there’s nothing like a mauling to shock us into truth.
Lest we forget, the Romans were assholes. The giraffes at Mombasa were only the latest in a northward train that first reached Rome in 46 BCE. As Cassius Dio relates,
I will give an account of the so-called camelopard, because it was then introduced into Rome by Caesar for the first time and exhibited to all. This animal is like a camel in all respects except that its legs are not all of the same length, the hind legs being the shorter. Beginning from the rump it grows gradually higher, which gives it the appearance of mounting some elevation; and towering high aloft, it supports the rest of its body on its front legs and lifts its neck in turn to an unusual height. Its skin is spotted like a leopard, and for this reason it bears the joint name of both animals.
At home, the giraffe makes sense: it’s so well-adapted to its ecosystem that it exemplifies a whole way of (mis)understanding evolution. Hauled into cities for spectacle, it becomes as ridiculous as we hairless apes are on the savannah. Horace makes its very name, spliced from other creatures, a byword for freakish hybridity that pulled in ancient crowds. And giraffes met far worse fates at Rome than Hamburg. Dio’s description occurs “ominously” within an account of wild beast hunts and gladiatorial games. These proverbially gentle giants were slaughtered for sport, even eaten: a butchered bone was found in a restaurant drain in Pompeii.
As Jane Goodall points out, human interactions with animals, the inter-species intimacies and consumer demand we’ve nurtured since antiquity, are one reason new diseases emerge. Trafficked pangolins are one possible intermediary for the novel coronavirus’ leap from bats to humans. The clustering of early cases near a seafood market in Wuhan fed racist assumptions about “barbaric” eating habits indulged in wet markets. The idea that Chinese people somehow “deserved” this karmic retribution spread as virally as the pathogen itself. But that giraffe bone in the drainpipe of Western civ shows how persistent our lust to eat the foreign has been and how far it’s mutated since antiquity. Now we turn exotic animals into cute stuffed animals or splashy entertainment, and turn our fangs on one another.
The giraffe’s upward-sloping anatomy hints of hope and progress, the chance that what’s strange from one angle makes sense from another. In Egypt, the giraffe pictogram, added to the hieroglyph for “prophecy,” meant “those who see and know before all others.” Maybe once the dust clears, we’ll better appreciate, as the ancients did, the cognitive height we gain from raising our heads above it all: above other times, other species, and (what’s tougher by far) the ways we’ve divided our own.
Stoic self-help memes have become almost as inescapable these days as Thucydides’ plague. As I said in a previous column, to rule your mind in perfect serenity amidst all this suffering would be almost pathological. On the other hand, for a culture that makes action figures of Jedi knights, we have a lot left to learn from Stoic sympatheia: the idea that we’re all mutually dependent parts of one interconnected cosmos.
Soon we may have no choice. Recovered patients are testing positive again; antibodies may not protect us; we’re pouring hopes and resources into vaccines that may not work, even if we beat the odds of development, production and distribution. We need international cooperation now more than ever for containment efforts not to prove futile. Globally, “we are only as strong as the weakest link in the chain.” Meanwhile, the president of the United States has threatened to withdraw crucial funding from the World Health Organization. And the White House has encouraged dangerous revolts against social distancing by people calling themselves “liberators” and likened, ludicrously, to Rosa Parks. I’m tired of trying to empathize with these people. They need to grow some compassion.
As I look at horror-movie images of protesters assaulting public safety like spike proteins attacking human cell receptors, I wonder how far we can stretch sympatheia. Years from now, will we have the expansiveness and humility of view to love the lion, to retell this story with COVID as the hero? Like Aeneas, it didn’t come here of its own will, craving American carnage; it was just trying to stay alive, following reproductive orders, accepting hospitality. It’s a fallacy, of course, to make either friend or enemy of an RNA plug-in that lives and spreads only through us. But the relationship’s one-sided, and for once, the asymmetry is not in our favor. We’re this contagion’s best friends, its zombie army, the in-fighting gods who daily expand its imperium sine fine.
The thing that kills most victims is not the virus itself, but the runaway immune response it triggers: the cytokine storm that damages the body’s own cells more than the invader. I have more confidence in the virus’ cold, mechanical replication than the wildfire of rage and ignorance that’s engulfing our nation. We have lost, we are losing, we will lose, human lives beyond value or reckoning. Can we find, in recompense, some way to do good with the compromises this pandemic will squeeze from us when we get to Book 12? Will it finally force us to cooperate; to believe in science and social safety nets; to dethrone the great deceivers of our public trust? Or if this pandemic is one global autoimmune test, will we blow up our species in a cytokine storm of mutual blame?
“Wonders are many, and none more wondrous than man.” But in the brief, brutal history of the anthropocene — culminating with our current “wars” against the coronavirus, climate change, and compassion — we’ve seen the enemy, and it is us. Giraffe populations that thrived while Pliny and Blixen wrote have plummeted by 40% in the last three decades. Now several subspecies are critically endangered, and eight times more “Sophie the Giraffe” teething toys are sold than real giraffes roam the wild. The problem, in their case, isn’t so much poaching as habitat reduction. Our cities, fences and highways have robbed giraffes of once unbroken domains. Atlantic writer Ed Yong, now covering the science of coronavirus, reads their spots as symbols for their fragmentation.
It was a mark of Homo sapiens’ privilege, before this pandemic, that we could go gawk at giraffes in every major zoo; board long-haul flights to admire them in situ. But the ceaseless industry, urbanization, and travel that have marked humanity’s overbearing presence on this planet and other creatures’ decline are now, ironically, the conduits to COVID’s spread. Is there a sublime poetic justice in the fact we “paragons of animals” have lost the freedoms we’ve usurped from others? A providence in the tiny virus that has upturned our lives and uncrowned our environmental tyranny?
As we gather on separate screens for happy hours in Hawaiian shirts, as we learn to play symphonies together without burning fossil fuels, now we’re the ones who are reticulated. We’ve paradoxically never needed one another so much; never been so able, from our individual headspaces and Twitterspheres, to ignore those who don’t look or think like us; and never been so poised as a species to make real revelations.
As we endure what on a human level is a profound tragedy, we might ask: whose grief, whose poetry? Thanks to the global slowdown in traffic and industry, the skies over Delhi are blue for the first time in years. China’s reduction in pollution may save 50,000 lives. Rare leatherback sea-turtles are nesting in record numbers on beaches suddenly cleansed of tourists, from Thailand to Florida. And out there in Africa, lions are sunning themselves on empty roads, enjoying our absence from the kingdom that’s always been theirs.
Do we have the courage and humility to live up to our scientific name, and with the Stoic sapiens, stop imagining ourselves as the heroes of this story and centers of this universe? To take a longer view, beyond our lost loved ones and conveniences, and see ourselves as infinitesimal components of a cosmos that will reassert its natural order, whatever we think or feel?
From a Stoic perspective, the little empires of our mind are tesserae in a mosaic, coral polyps within a reef. It’s up to us to step back and discern the pattern. Coronavirus gifts us the chance to see that we’re not the giraffe, or even its spots, but the negative spaces in between: connecting, dividing, inserting our selves and lamentations into other species’ equally valid struggles to live on this earth.
Because amidst our microscopic strife as political animals, we’re also members of one vast body politic. When the giraffe’s neck shudders, when it suffers or starves, so do we. Maybe this shared cataclysm will force the painful recognition that, for better or worse, we’re all interconnected, com-passionate parts of the same sublime organism.
Here we are, where we ought to be.
Nandini Pandey is a UCLA-correlated hotshot specializing in otorhinolaryngology. Follow her @global_classics and check out her other Eidolon posts on classics and coronavirus.
