But here I stood, and it seemed like such a natural place to stand. My transgression had been nothing more than treating a cat with respect, nothing more than allowing him into my soul as an equal spirit.
Yes indeed, yes indeed, a grave malfeasance. And what was the harvest of my sin? Why, nothing more than a few insights into my self and a few lessons on life. I decided to count them.
First, Darwin taught me to respect life. He revealed that the essence of respect is self-restraint, and he showed that to respect life you must love life. He taught me in his dying throes that all living things want to go on living, no matter how grave the circumstance, and because I had come to love this small creature, I came to love all living things. As a biologist I understood the need to eat those we love, for life is a cannibalistic affair, with all animal forms eating other forms of life. But as a humbled human being, I now wanted all living things to live as good a life as nature saw fit to allow. Now I saw how brutal, painful, and short life is for those who live honestly, in nature, without medicine, without law, without rights, without any civilized amenity; I would not make it harsher than it naturally is. This love of life consists simply of good will for the living and empathy for their pain, suffused with an immense ecstasy in the beauty and goodness of the earth.
I learned from Darwin that love is like a bank. It solicits our business and encourages us to invest by giving us the pleasures of the body when we are young and vital and vibrating with lust; it pays us back with interest in depthless gratitude for the time that each has given the other over the years, secure in the faith that each will remain for the other until the end goes past, as we face the scheduled pains and oblivion of old age. Thus I learned the lessons of loyalty and personal commitment and self-denial for the benefit of others, for my teacher never nagged and never preached. He drew forth goodness by placing responsibility on me, and me alone.
As for the human mind, I learned from Darwin that it is the universe in a bone, nothing less. And nothing more. I learned from his terminal care that we cannot escape the self, cannot leave the skull, and I learned that consciousness is supremely self-centered, because human consciousness is the self. Therefore the grand challenge is to transcend that consciousness and enter the mind of another life, knowing that transcendence cannot be attained.
Ah, but the attempt is the reason for being. Darwin showed me that the mind is meant to embrace others. It happens naturally, without trying: while the brain makes memories by altering molecules and neurons, the mind grows around those with whom it lives like roots around a rock. Nothing is more natural than this process. So I grew around Darwin and Darwin grew around me, and with this small epiphany the Mass continued.
"Enough," said Darwin. "My work is done."
He curled up, resting his head on his paws, and looked up at me impatiently from beneath his brow, just as he had on that fateful day a year and a half earlier, when our lives converged. Now our time had come to an end.
"Oh, Darwin, I'm going to miss you so much."
"You have much to learn," said Darwin testily. "But you will. Go with Hoover—you could have done better, but he is adequate—and with the others you will meet on the way. They will guide you."
The ineluctable tears, the struggle in the throat, the internal pressure of exploding grief.
"I will be here so long as you live," said Darwin matter-of-factly, "here, in the roots of your brain, to visit whenever you wish. And someday, when your time comes, the molecules of my memory and your spirit will blend together in the earth. Go now. I will rest awhile."
He raised his head, stood up, arched his back, and walked toward me. I dropped to hands and knees and lowered my face to his. He raised his head and extended his neck in one last gesture of love, and slowly, gently our noses came together. As they touched, Darwin vanished, and I found myself staring at a small pile of ashes on the leaves. I stayed there for a few moments, unable to move, feeling the leaves and the damp earth.
I got to my feet, pushed through the wall of foliage, and emerged into the ecstatic beauty of late afternoon. The light slanted into the clouds from the west, exposing caves and crevices and great, soft outcroppings of puffy white. Gulls soared in circles, slicing in white crescents across the towering structures and exulting with wild, cackling yelps in the sheer joy of being gulls.
The air stung my face and I breathed the clear, cold atmosphere, savoring the molecules of oxygen which soon would flow with my blood into my metabolism. Emerging as carbon dioxide, the molecules would rise into the air when I breathed out. I was not standing in the environment; I was the environment. I was the substance I breathed and ate and channeled through this earthly form in a promiscuous stream of plasma. I was part of a larger existence that extended forth from the first living things in an unbroken line to Darwin and to me, a live, organic cloth of ever-changing forms that clings to the ever-changing world and will endure till the day the sun goes out. It struck me then that evolution is about kinship and kinship is about love and love is the essence of light.
I raised my face to the sun, drank deep of the sweet living air, and thanked Darwin for giving me Life.
Epilogue
In the end,
because I became a cat,
I became a human being.
A Cat Named Darwin Page 17