COWARD’S COURAGE

 

February 8, 1977

 

     It took me five days to go up, just one day to come down, but in this one day, I saw more beauty than in its five predecessors combined.  My facing downhill and seeing the magnificent panorama helped, but the difference was in the landscape of my mind, which during my uphill journey was enshrouded in a fog of hopelessness, meaninglessness, purposelessness.

     While Raminothna delivered me from my despair, it was an insect, of all things, that delivered me from my sense of cowardice.  Half way down the mountain it was the song of a cicada that made me stop in my track.  It was a sound that I had heard before.  It reminded me of my childhood on the edge of the South China Sea. 

     “She is singing.  She seems happy,” said Raminothna in my mind.  “Since you seem tire of being a human, would you rather be a cicada instead?” Raminothna asked me.

     To me, the cicada was no ordinary insect.  It is not something one could take for granted.  This particular species of cicada, if I’m not mistaken, has a life cycle of 17 years, in which it spends no more than several days above ground.  And in these precious and glorious days, they would fill the air with song.  So, to see or just hear a cicada can be said to be a rare privilege.  And yet, on my uphill journey, I had just allowed their symphony to pass me by. 

     It is a subtly handsome insect, robust in build, with a greenish metallic sheen and transparent lacey wings.  Though basically non-social, it is nonetheless behaviorally sophisticated.  Within days of its song – which was basically a mating call – it would die, hopefully not before mating and the laying of its eggs. 

     As soon as a cicada is born, in the form of an egg among millions all laid within the three or four day period, its days are numbered.  When a nymph hatches from an egg, it will by instinct bore its way into the soil to evade the above-ground predators, notably birds.  There, in the damp and dark it will live out its entire life time sucking sap from plant roots. Very few would survive the gamut of life’s dangers to eventually sing their own songs, since the subterranean world is itself criss-crossed with tunnels of predatory moles, and occupied in unexpected places by nests of marauding ants.  And in the end, if it survived that long, it would have to emerge from the ground all over again into the world of sun and wind, and birds – those mighty predators of cicadas.  Or worse, a certain parasitic wasp, which would seek out a cicada, sting it and inject a venom that would render it paralyzed in a state of suspended animation – a form of living death which ironically lengthens the cicada’s lifespan – and, after dragging it into its burrow, the wasp would deposits a single egg into the body of the cicada.  When the wasp larva hatches from the egg, it would devour the cicada from within, alive.  Basically, for the cicada, there is nowhere in the world that is safe.  Life while it lasts is full of peril.  In the end, save the few moments of conjugal bliss, if you could call it that, there is only pain and horror, and always death. 

     “What a life.  What a fate to be a cicada.  No, thank you,” I answered.

     “It sings nonetheless,” said Raminothna.

     Later, I startled a small herd of gerenuk, which dashed away with the utmost grace.

     “Would you rather be a gerenuk?  You can never hope to be half as graceful as a human, unless of course you’re Nureyev.”

     All herbivores end up being killed and eaten by carnivores, except those who die of thirst or starvation first.  The zebra killed by a lion can consider itself lucky, since it is usually death by asphyxiation, which in the scheme of things is preferred to being killed by a pack of hunting dogs or hyenas, which usually begin devouring their prey alive while the hunt was still on.  The prey literally die on the run.  What an awful thought.

     “No, I don’t think so,” I said.

     “How about a hunting dog or a hyena then?”

     “No.  And I wouldn’t want to be a cheetah either, nor even a lion, whose fate would likely be starvation in the end, if not themselves killed by rivals or devoured by other predators.  What a fate, even to be the king of beasts!”

     “But there is one thing in their favour, in relation of you humans.”

     “And that is?”

     “Their relative unawareness of their own inevitable and necessarily unpleasant end.  They don’t agonize until agony is felt.  They don’t see the shadow of death before death is upon them.”

     “I see your point, and I do see the various possible horrible ways by which I could die, and oh so vividly – aging, senility, cancer, stroke, heart failure, accidents, murder…  You name it.  And the inevitability of death itself.  What psychological torture!  What spiritual torment!  What a fate, to be human!!”

     “Dear Homo sapiens, I have seen your smiles in spite of all, and read your poetry of hope, and heard your songs of joy.  I have seen you yourself smile, and heard you yourself sing.  The fact that you are human, therefore, even one you consider a coward, preordains you with a certain godly quality, with which you should be well pleased.”

     “And that is?”

     “Courage.”