I Am a Strange Loop

CHAPTER 24

On Magnanimity and Friendship

Are There Small and Large Souls?

HERE and there in this book, alluding to James Huneker’s droll warning to “small-souled men” quoted in Chapter 1, I have somewhat light-heartedly referred to the number of “hunekers” comprising various human souls, but I have never been specific about the kinds of traits a highhuneker or low-huneker soul would tend to exhibit. Indeed, any hint at such a distinction risks becoming inflammatory, because in our culture there is a dogma that states, roughly, that all human lives are worth exactly the same amount.

And yet we violate that dogma routinely. The most obvious case is that of a declared war, where as a society we officially slip into an alternate collective mode in which the value of the lives of a huge subset of humanity is suddenly reduced to zero. I needn’t spell this out because it is so blatant. Another clear violation of our dogma is capital punishment, where society collectively chooses to terminate a human life. Basically, society has judged that a certain soul merits no respect at all. Short of capital punishment, there is incarceration, where society treats people with many different levels of dignity or lack thereof, implicitly showing different levels of respect for different-sized souls. Consider also the phenomenal differences in the measures taken by physicians in attempting to save lives. A head of state (or the head of any large corporation) who has a heart attack will receive far better care than a random citizen, not to mention an illegal alien.

Why do I see such unequal treatments by society as tacit distinctions between the values of souls? Because I think that wittingly or unwittingly, we all equate the size of a living being’s soul with the “objective” value of that being’s life, which is to say, the degree of respect that we outsiders pay to that being’s interiority. And we certainly do not place equal values on all beings’ lives! We don’t hesitate for a moment to draw a huge distinction between the values of a human life and an animal life, and between the values of the lives of different “levels” of animals.

Thus most humans willingly participate, directly or indirectly, in the killing of animals of many different species and the eating of their flesh (sometimes even mixing together fragments of the bodies of pigs, cows, and lambs in a single dish). We also nonchalantly feed our pets with pieces of the bodies of animals we have killed. Such actions establish in our minds, obviously, a hierarchy within the realm of animal souls (unless someone were to argue in good old black-and-white style that the word “soul” does not even apply to animals, but such absolutism seems to me more like received dogma than like considered reflection).

Most people I know would rate (either explicitly, in words, or implicitly, through choices made) cat souls as higher than cow souls, cow souls higher than rat souls, rat souls higher than snail souls, snail souls higher than flea souls, and so forth. And so I ask myself, if soul-size distinctions between species are such a commonplace and non-threatening notion, why should we not also be willing to consider some kind of explicit (not just tacit) spectrum of soul-sizes within a single species, and in particular within our own?

From the Depths to the Heights

Having painted myself into a corner in the preceding section, I’ll go out on a limb and make a very crude stab at such a distinction. To do so I will merely cite two ends of a wide spectrum, with yourself and myself, dear reader, presumably falling somewhere in the mid-range (but hopefully closer to the “high” end than to the “low” one).

At the low end, then, I would place uncontrollably violent psychopaths — adults essentially incapable of internalizing other people’s (or animals’) mental states, and who because of this incapacity routinely commit violent acts against other beings. It may simply be these people’s misfortune to have been born this way, but whatever the reason, I class them at the low end of the spectrum. To put it bluntly, these are people who are not as conscious as normal adults are, which is to say, they have smaller souls.

I won’t suggest a numerical huneker count, because that would place us in the domain of the ludicrous. I simply hope that you see my general point and don’t find it an immoral view. It’s not much different, after all, from saying that such people should be kept behind bars, and no one I know considers prisons to be immoral institutions per se (it’s another matter how they are run, of course).

What about the high end of the spectrum? I suspect it will come as no surprise that I would point to individuals whose behavior is essentially the opposite of that of violent psychopaths. This means gentle people such as Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Raoul Wallenberg, Jean Moulin, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and César Chávez — extraordinary individuals whose deep empathy for those who suffer leads them to devote a large part of their lives to helping others, and to doing so in nonviolent fashions. Such people, I propose, are more conscious than normal adults are, which is to say, they have greater souls.

Although I seldom attach much weight to the etymologies of words, I was delighted to notice, when preparing a lecture on these ideas a few years ago, that the word “magnanimity”, which for us is essentially a synonym of “generosity”, originally meant, in Latin, “having a great soul” (animus meaning “soul”). It gave me much pleasure to see this familiar word in a new light, thanks to this X-ray. (And then, to my surprise, in preparing this book’s rather fanatical index, I discovered that “Mahatma” — the title of respect usually given to Gandhi — also means “great soul”.) Another appealing etymology is that of “compassion”, which comes from Latin roots meaning “suffering along with”. These hidden messages echoing down the millennia stimulated me to explore this further.

The Magnanimity of Albert Schweitzer

My personal paragon for great-souledness is the theologian, musician, writer, and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, who was born in 1875 in the tiny village of Kaysersberg in Alsace (which was then part of Germany, even though my beloved old French encyclopedia Le Petit Robert 2, dating from exactly one century later, claims him as français!), and who became world-famous for the hospital that he founded in 1913 in Lambaréné, Gabon, and where he worked for over fifty years.

Already at a very young age, Schweitzer identified with others, felt pity and compassion for them, and wanted to spare them pain. Where did this empathic generosity come from? Who can say? For example, on his very first day at school, six-year-old Albert noticed that he had been decked out by his parents in fancier clothes than his schoolmates, and this disparity disturbed him greatly. From that day onward, he insisted on dressing just like his poorer schoolmates.

A vivid excerpt from Schweitzer’s autobiographical opus Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit portrays the compassion that pervaded his life:

As far as I can peer back into my childhood, I suffered from all the misery that I saw in the world around me. I truly never knew a simple, youthful joie de vivre, and I believe that this is the case for many children, even if from the outside they give the appearance of being completely happy and carefree.

In particular, I was tormented by the fact that poor animals had to endure such great pain and need. The sight of an old, limping horse being dragged along by one man while another man beat it with a stick as it was being driven to the Colmar slaughterhouse haunted me for weeks. Even before I entered school, I found it incomprehensible that in my evening prayer I was supposed to pray only for the sake of human beings. And so I secretly spoke the words to a prayer that I had made up myself. It ran this way: “Dear God, protect and bless everything that breathes, keep it from all evil, and let it softly sleep.”

Schweitzer’s compassion for animals was not limited to mammals but extended all the way down the spectrum to such lowly creatures as worms and ants. (I say “all the way down” and “lowly” not to indicate disdain, but only to suggest that Schweitzer, like nearly all humans, must have had a “consciousness cone”, vaguely like mine on page 19. Such a mental hierarchy can just as easily give rise to a sense of concern and responsibility as to a sense of disdain.) He once remarked to a ten-year-old boy who was about to step on an ant, “That’s my personal ant. You’re liable to break its legs!” He would routinely pick up a worm he saw in the middle of a street or an insect flailing in a pond and place it in a field or on a plant so that it could try to survive. Indeed, he commented rather bitterly, “Whenever I help an insect in distress, I do so in an attempt to atone for some of the guilt contracted by humanity for its crimes against animals.”

As is well known, Schweitzer’s simple but profound guiding principle was what he termed “reverence for life”. In the address delivered when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1953, Schweitzer declared:

The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret… It has come to believe that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to human beings.

The following anecdote, also from Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit, is particularly revealing. In the springtime, with Easter approaching, little Albert, seven or eight years old, had been invited by a comrade — a comrade-in-arms, quite literally! — to go on an adventure of killing birds with slingshots that they had just made together. Looking back at this turning point in his life from the perspective of many decades later, Schweitzer recalls:

This was an abhorrent proposal, but I dared not refuse out of fear that he would mock me. Soon we found ourselves standing near a leafless tree whose branches were filled with birds singing out gaily in the morning, without any fear of us. My companion, crouching low like an Indian on a hunt, placed a pebble in the leather pouch of his slingshot and stretched it tightly. Obeying the imperious glance he threw at me, I did the same, while fighting sharp pangs of conscience and at the same time vowing firmly to myself that I would shoot when he did.

Just at that moment, church bells began to ring out, mingling with the song of the birds in the sunshine. These were the early bells that preceded the main bells by half an hour. For me, though, they were a voice from Heaven. I threw my slingshot down, startling the birds so that they flew off to a spot safe from my companion’s slingshot, and I fled home.

Ever since that day, whenever the bells of Holy Week ring out amidst the leafless trees of spring, I have remembered with deep gratitude how on that fateful day they rang into my heart the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” From that day on, I swore that I would liberate myself from the fear of other people. Whenever my inner convictions were at stake, I gave less weight to the opinions of other people than I once had. And I did my best to overcome the fear of being mocked by my peers.

Here we have a classic conflict between peer pressure and one’s own inner voices, or as we usually phrase it (and as Schweitzer himself put it), one’s conscience. In this case, fortunately, conscience was the clear winner. And indeed, this was a decision that lasted a lifetime.

Does Conscience Constitute Consciousness?

In this region of semantic space there is one further linguistic observation that strikes me as most provocative. That is the fact that in the Romance languages, the words for “conscience” and “consciousness”, which strike us English speakers as very distinct concepts, are one and the same (for example, the French word conscience has both meanings, a fact that I learned when, as a teen-ager, I bought a book entitled Le cerveau et la conscience). This may merely be a lexical gap or a confusing semantic blur in these languages (the meaning on a literal level is “co-knowledge”), but even if that’s the case, I nonetheless think of it as offering us an insight that might otherwise never occur to us: that the partial internalization of other creatures’ interiority (conscience) is what most clearly marks off creatures who have large souls (much consciousness) from creatures that have small souls, and from yet others that have none or next to none.

I think it’s obvious, or nearly so, that mosquitoes have no conscience and likewise no consciousness, hence nothing meriting the word “soul”. These flying, buzzing, blood-sucking automata are more like miniature heat-seeking missiles than like soulful beings. Can you imagine a mosquito experiencing mercy or pity or friendship? ’Nough said. Next!

What about, say, lions — the very prototype of the notion of carnivore? Lions stalk, pounce on, rip into, and devour giraffes and zebras that are still kicking and braying, and they do so without the slightest mercy or pity, which suggests a complete lack of compassion, and yet they seem to care a great deal about their own young, nuzzling them, nurturing them, protecting them, teaching them. This is quite unmosquito-like behavior! Moreover, I suspect that lions can easily come to care for certain beasts of other species (such as humans). In this sense, a lion can and will internalize certain limited aspects of the interiority of at least some other creatures (especially those of a few other lions, most particularly its immediate family), even though it may remain utterly oblivious to and indifferent to those of most other creatures (a quality that sounds depressingly like most humans).

I think it’s also obvious, or nearly so, that most dogs care about other creatures — particularly humans who belong to their inner circle. Indeed, it’s well known that some dogs, displaying incredible magnanimity, will lay down their lives for their owners. I have yet to hear about a lion doing such a thing for any animal of another species, although I suppose some dog-like lion, somewhere or other, may have once fought to the death against another beast in order to save the life of a human companion. It’s a bit too much of a stretch, however, to imagine a lion choosing to be a vegetarian.

And yet a quick Web search shows that the idea of a vegetarian lion is not all that rare (usually in fiction, admittedly, but not always). Indeed, such a lion, a female named “Little Tyke”, was apparently brought up as a pet near Seattle. For four years (so says the Web site), Little Tyke refused all meat offered her until finally her owners gave up trying and accepted her vegetarian ways and her joy at playing with lambs, chickens, and other beasts. Until her dying day, Little Tyke was a vegetarian lion. Will miracles never cease?

In any case, having a conscience — a sense of morality and of caring about doing “the right thing” towards other sentient beings — strikes me as the most natural and hopefully also the most reliable sign of consciousness in a being. Perhaps this simply boils down to how much one puts into practice the Golden Rule.

Albert Schweitzer and Johann Sebastian Bach

I have to admit that I have always intuitively felt there was another and quite different yardstick for measuring consciousness, although a most blurry and controversial one: musical taste. I certainly cannot explain or defend my own musical taste, and I know I would be getting myself into very deep, hot, and murky waters if I were to try, so I won’t even begin. I will, however, have to reveal a little bit of my musical taste in order to talk about Albert Schweitzer and his musical profundity.

For my sixteenth birthday, my mother gave me a record of the first eight preludes and fugues of Book One of J. S. Bach’s monumental work, The Well-Tempered Clavier, as played on the piano by Glenn Gould. This was my first contact with the notion of “fugue”, and it had an electrifying effect on my young mind. For the next several years, every time I went into a record store, I would seek out other parts of The Well-Tempered Clavier on piano, for it was a genuine rarity those days (even on harpsichord, but especially on piano, which I preferred). Every time I found a new set of preludes and fugues from either volume, the act of putting the needle down in the grooves of the new record and listening to it for the first time was among the most exciting events in my life.

In my parents’ record collection, there was also a recording of several Bach organ works as performed by Albert Schweitzer, but it took me a long time to come around to giving it a try, because I feared it would be too “heavy”. But when I finally did, what I heard was incredibly moving and I became as addicted to it as I had ever been to The Well-Tempered Clavier. I then naturally expanded my search in record stores to include Bach organ works, but I soon discovered something that troubled me, which was that many performers took them very swiftly and jauntily, as if they were merely virtuoso exercises as opposed to profound statements about the human condition. Schweitzer’s playing was humble and simple, and it charmed me that he made mistakes now and then but simply went on unperturbedly (in no other recordings would one hear even a single mistake anywhere, which struck me as unnatural and even bizarre). It also happened, although I didn’t know it then, that these performances had all been recorded on a simple organ in the very church in the Alsatian village of Günsbach whose bells had pealed one bright spring morning, saving the lives of a bird or two, and transforming young Albert’s life, and therewith, the lives of thousands of people.

Dig that Profundity!

Over the years, Bach as played by Schweitzer became a deep part of me. I obtained several more recordings by him, all belonging to the same series, each one revealing new depths of a cosmic wisdom (perhaps that sounds grandiose, but to me it is exactly on the mark) that emanated from both composer and performer.

I was naturally filled with gratification when the popularity of my book Gödel, Escher, Bach linked my name in some fashion in the musical community with that of Bach (this was a true honor), and in Bach’s 300th birthyear, 1985, I had the pleasure of participating in several tricentennial celebrations, including a tiny one on his exact birthday that I organized in Ann Arbor for the members of a class I was teaching, plus a few friends, the highlight of which was the small firestorm unleashed when we lit all 300 candles on the giant birthday cake I had ordered.

Fifteen years later, I was surprised to be invited to participate in a commemoration in Rovereto, Italy, of the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death (which had taken place in July of 1750), but since I was going to be in northern Italy at that time in any case, I gladly accepted. Several memorable talks were delivered in the afternoon, and after a banquet there was to be a treat — a performance of a number of Bach pieces (transcribed for small chorus) by a well-known singing troupe. I remembered their skill and was looking forward to a rewarding evening of moving music.

What I heard, however, was something quite different, although I should perhaps have anticipated it: a nonstop display of unrestrained vocal virtuosity, and nothing but that. It was terribly impressive, but to my mind it was also terribly vapid. The lowlight of the entire performance for me was when the singers came to one of the most profound of all the Bach organ fugues — the G minor fugue often called simply “The Great” (BWV 542), a work that I loved as played by Albert Schweitzer in all his modesty, but with unrivaled depth of feeling. Regrettably, I will never forget how they tackled this meditative fugue at roughly twice the speed it should be taken at, lighting into it as if they were sprinting to catch a train, and struttin’ their stuff like nobody’s business. They bounced on their toes, as if to try to get the audience to swing along with their snappy rhythm, and they even snapped their fingers to the beat (even the word “beat” sounds ridiculous in this hallowed context). Several of the singers periodically flashed bright grins at the audience, as if to say, “Aren’t we fabulous? Ever heard anyone sing so many notes per second in your life? How about those trills! Isn’t this music sexy? Hope you’re all diggin’ it! And don’t forget, we have lots of CD’s you can buy after the show!”

All of this threw me for a real loop. Of course there is room in this world for many ways to perform any work of music, and of course there was something interesting about these singers’ speed and slickness, and the way that they executed ultrarapid trills flawlessly — it was impressive in much the same way as the engineering details of a beautiful sports car are impressive — but for me it had nothing to do with the meaning of the music. That meaning was contemplative and cosmic, not frilly and show-offy. I am tolerant of many diverse ways of playing pieces of music, but I also have my limits and this went considerably beyond them. It made me long to hear the slightly flawed, very mortal, and reflective profundity of Albert Schweitzer at his little village organ in Günsbach, but that was not in the cards that evening. It was a classic case of sacred versus profane, and it remains vivid in my memory.

Only in preparing this chapter did I come across some writings by Schweitzer himself that strangely echo (if echoes can precede their causes!) my great troubledness that evening in Rovereto. Here is what he wrote, almost one hundred years earlier, about performances of Bach in that era:

Many performers have been performing Bach for years without experiencing for themselves the deepening that Bach is capable of bringing out in any true artist. Most of our singers are far too caught up in technique to sing Bach correctly. Only a very small number of them can reproduce the spirit of his music; the rest of them are incapable of penetrating into the Master’s spiritual world. They do not feel what Bach is trying to say, and therefore cannot transmit it to anyone else. Worst of all, they consider themselves to be outstanding Bach interpreters, and have no awareness of what it is that they lack. Sometimes one has to wonder how listeners who attend such superficial performances are able to detect even the slightest sign of the depth of Bach’s music.

Those who understand the situation today will not consider these comments to be exaggeratedly pessimistic. Our enchantment with Bach is undergoing a crisis. The danger is that our love for Bach’s music will become superficial and that too much vanity and smugness will be mixed in with it. Our era’s lamentable trend towards imitation comes out also in the way that we take Bach over, which is all too visible these days. We act as if we wanted to praise Bach, but in truth we only praise ourselves. We act as if we had rediscovered him, understood him, and performed him as no one has ever done before. A bit less noise, a bit less “Bach dogmatism”, a bit more ability, a bit more humility, a bit more tranquility, a bit more devotion… Only thus will Bach be more honored in spirit and in truth than he has been before.

There is little I can add to this trenchant criticism of superficiality taking itself for depth; I will simply say that running across it comforted me, even though I did so several years after the Rovereto event, as it made me know that I am not alone in my lamentation. Schweitzer was the most humble and self-effacing of people, and so his remarks have to be taken as nothing other than an honest reaction to a deplorable trend that was already clear a century ago and that seems only to be increasing today.

Alle Grashüpfer Müssen Sterben

What, some readers may be asking themselves, does any of this have to do with “I” or consciousness or souls? My response would be, “What could have more to do with consciousness or souls than merging oneself with the combined spirituality of Albert Schweitzer and J. S. Bach?”

The other night, in order to refresh my musty memories of Schweitzer playing Bach organ music (which I listened to hundreds of times in my teen-age years and my twenties), I pulled all four of the old vinyl records off my shelf and put them on in succession. I began with the prelude and fugue in A major (BWV 536, nicknamed by Schweitzer the “walking fugue”) and went through many others, winding up with my very favorite, the beatific prelude and fugue in G major (BWV 541), and then as a final touch, I listened to the achingly sweet–sad chorale-prelude “Alle Menschen Müssen Sterben” (“We All Must Die” — or perhaps, in order to echo the trochaic meter of the German, “Human Beings All Are Mortal”).

While I was sitting silently in my living room, listening intently to the soft notes of these fathomless meditations, I noticed a lone grasshopper sitting on the rug. At first I thought it was dead (after all, all grasshoppers must die, too), but when I approached, it took a big hop, so I quickly grabbed a glass bowl from a nearby table, flipped it over to trap the little jumper, then carefully slid a record cover underneath, so as to form a floor for this glassy room. Then I carried the improvised craft and its diminutive passenger to my front door, opened it, and let the grasshopper leap down onto a bush in the dark night. Only while I was in the middle of this minisamaritan act did the resonance with Schweitzer’s spirit cross my mind — in fact, it happened just as I slid the record cover, which has a drawing by Ben Shahn of Schweitzer at the organ, underneath the glass bowl, so that the grasshopper was sitting on Schweitzer’s hand. Something felt just right about this fortuitous conjunction.

An hour or so later, as I got up to stretch, I chanced to notice a carpenter ant crawling under a table, and so once again I made a little transport vehicle for it and escorted my six-legged friend outside. It started to seem rather curious to me that all this mini-samaritanism was happening while I was so immersed in Bach’s profound spirituality and Schweitzer’s pacifistic mentality of “reverence for life”.

Perhaps to break this spell, or perhaps to underline my own personal dividing line, I then saw another little black dot moving in a certain familiar zigzaggy fashion in the air near a lamp, and I went to investigate. The small black dot landed on the table below the lamp, and there was no question what it was: a mosquito, un moustique, una zanzara, eine Mücke. One moment later, that Mücke was history (I’ll spare you the details). By this point, I suspect, my views on the expendability of mosquitoes have probably become an annoyingly familiar refrain to readers of this book, but I have to say that I felt not the tiniest twinge of regret at the late bloodseeking missile’s demise.

A little before midnight, I interrupted my music-listening session to call my aging and ailing mother out in California, since I have a routine of phoning her every evening to give her a bit of family news and a bit of cheer. After our brief chat, I returned to my music, and when the Dorian toccata and fugue came on, I found my thoughts turning to a close friend who deeply loves that piece, and to his son, who had just been diagnosed with a worrisome illness. The music went on, and all these thoughts about beloved people and the precious, frightening fragility of human life somehow blended naturally with it.

To cap it all off, at some point after midnight, I heard a knock at the back door (not a standard event at our house, I assure you!), and I went to see who it was. It turned out to be a teen-ager whom I had met once or twice, who had been kicked out of his home a month earlier by his parents and who was sleeping in parks. He said it was a bit nippy that night and asked me if he could sleep in our playroom. I thought about it for a moment and since I knew my daughter trusted him, I said yes.

All at once it seemed an extremely strange coincidence that all of these intensely human things, these events dependent on my mirroring of other beings’ interiorities, were taking place right while I was so focused on the concepts of compassion and magnanimity.

Friends

Compassion, magnanimity, reverence for life — all these are qualities epitomized by Albert Schweitzer, who in addition had the remarkable quality of being a reverential Bach organist — but to my mind, this is no accident. Some might say that Schweitzer and people of his rare caliber are selfless. I understand this idea and I think there’s some truth to it, but on the other hand, oddly enough, I have been arguing, as does etymology, that the more magnanimous one is, the greater one’s self or soul is, not the smaller! So I would say that those who strike us as self-less are in fact very soul-full — that is, they house many other souls inside their own skulls/brains/minds/souls — and I don’t think this sharing of mind-space diminishes their central core but enlarges and enriches it. As Walt Whitman put it in his poem “Song of Myself ”, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” All this richness is a consequence of the fact that at some point in the dim past, the generic human brain surpassed a critical threshold of flexibility and became quasi-universal, able to internalize the abstract essences of other human brains. It is something to marvel at.

One day, as I was trying to figure out where I personally draw the line for applying the word “conscious” (even though of course there’s no sharp cutoff), it occurred to me that the most crucial factor was whether or not the entity in question could be said to have some notion, perhaps only very primitive, of “friend”, a friend being someone you care about and who cares about you. It seems clear that human babies acquire the rudiments of this notion pretty early on, and it also seems clear that some kinds of animals — mostly but not only mammals — have a pretty well-developed sense of the “friend” concept.

It’s clear that dogs feel that certain humans and dogs are their friends, and possibly also a few other animals. I won’t try to enumerate which types of animals seem capable of acquiring the “friend” notion because it’s blurry and because you can run down a mental list just as easily I can. But the more I think about this, the righter it feels to me. And so I find myself led to the unexpected conclusion that what seems to be the epitome of selfhood — a sense of “I” — is in reality brought into being if and only if along with that self there is a sense of other selves with whom one has bonds of affection. In short, only when generosity is born is an ego born.

How different this is from the view held by the majorityof philosophers of mind about the nature of consciousness! That view is that consciousness is the consequence of having so-called qualia, the supposedly primordial experiences (such as the retinal buzz made by the color purple, the sound of middle C, or the taste of Cabernet Sauvignon) out of which all “higher” experiences are built in bottom-up fashion. My view, in contrast, posits a high abstraction as the threshold at which consciousness starts to emerge from the gloom. Mosquitoes may “experience” the quale of the taste of blood, but they are unconscious of that quale, in just the way that toilets respond to but are totally unconscious of the various qualia of different water levels. Now if mosquitoes only had big enough brains to allow them to have friends, then they could be conscious of that great taste! Alas, the poor small-brained mosquitoes are constitutionally deprived of that chance.

But our glory as human beings is that, thanks to being beings with brains complicated enough to allow us to have friends and to feel love, we get the bonus of experiencing the vast world around us, which is to say, we get consciousness. Not a bad deal at all.