I was pushing Theo about in his stroller this morning, and we had to dodge a lot of fallen limbs from the trees that were blown about in the big storm last night. Everyone was out complaining and sawing and piling, and it didn’t seem catastrophic to me. Only natural.
Nature provides the big storms to knock down the dying limbs. The weak parts of the tree. Just as there are forest fires so nature can rejuvenate itself. And there used to be famine and plague and sweeping illnesses so that the less strong parts of the human race were cleared away.
I was on safari once in Africa and saw a mother lion with three strong cubs following her, and at the end of the line a fourth cub that was about half the size of the others. Very adorable, of course, in his struggling to keep up. I realized at the time that his chances of growing up were slight. And mother and siblings had no feelings of giving the littlest one any special care and attention.
So there we have nature, sprawling forward, cleaning itself up, with no feelings about those parts of it that can’t keep up the pace. And then we have human beings, the only part of nature that seems to have the capacity to care for one another. Is that because we are the only part of nature that can step back and look at ourselves? Our brains having developed more in us? So we can be horrible in the destruction of each other and also go to enormous lengths to help people in wheelchairs, Siamese twins, the disabled of every kind. There is a sense of duty to help the frailer keep up with the stronger. Where did that come from?
If we are each a cell in some kind of übermind . . . some kind of overmind . . ., are we the part being designed to confront nature? Love in itself seems to be a kind of contradiction of nature. But there are some animals in nature who team up for their lifetimes. Penguins? Strange, isn’t it? No wonder we often feel that we are a mass of contradictions. Strange that humans may be on the front edge of a defiance of nature. I must talk to Edwina about this. She would understand.