Authors: Andrei Bitov
“Yes, I suppose you could say that,” the doctor would agree reluctantly.
“Then,” I would say, “we can hypothesize
…
”
“Yes, that, too,” he would agree stolidly.
“It turns out that man
…
” I would say, heading into the homestretch.
“No,” the doctor would say, and easily rebut me, with arguments to spare.
I would retreat temporarily, nodding.
But by now he was used to the freedom of our conversations. Little by little I had corrupted him. His imperative was weakening. I don’t think this was because I was persuasive; all these ideas had been languishing within him for a long time, unusable. At first he spoke only of primitive man. In this connection, he might let slip such definitive sentences as: “Man has a low fertility rate compared to other animals.”
Or: “Flourishing species strive to increase their numbers and territory as much as possible. Man is a flourishing species; his urge to settle in new places and increase his numbers is natural. By the beginning of our era, the number of people on earth is estimated to have been two to three million
…
That was the antique world
…
” He sighed pensively.
“Malthus
…
” I said. Sand gritted in my teeth, and now we turned back.
The doctor’s attitude toward Malthus was complicated. History beckoned him. The ecologist in him was tempted by the epochs that showed through in the distant past, where vain details had been effaced and the count was kept not by decades but by centuries.
“Why do you think Alexander the Great stopped?
…
No, no, his military machine was flawless. There was nothing in the world that could resist it. Simply, he had gone so far beyond his geographic range, and he had won so long ago the lands sufficient for the further consolidation and prosperity of his own country, that the biological purpose of his aggression (to expand the territory for a flourishing population) was completely exhausted. By the time he reached India and Central Asia he was a traveler, almost an amateur ethnographer: he arrayed himself in the national garb of the new lands that had nominally submitted to him. There was nothing he could do but leave, with no likelihood of reaching the subjugated country ever again
…
He could not turn back, he seemed to have forgotten where he came from. His death was obscure. Thus all aggression miscarries, establishing only the necessary boundary to the expansion of its geographic range.”
“Interesting,” I observed. “It’s been a fairly long time since we had a war. Could modern tourism be viewed as sublimated aggression?”
“Are you saying this to me, or am I to you?” The doctor was tempted. Like Alexander, he could no longer stop. He measured history in imperial giant steps. The same had also happened, as the doctor saw it, with a later people, the Norse (thus he was creeping into epochs closer to ours, while I, like a hunter concealed in his blind, didn’t breathe or move or interrupt). The Vikings had also possessed military might, comparable to Alexander’s. They had had no equal—they could have gained a world much more livable, from our standpoint, than their cliffs and fjords. But from the biological standpoint they behaved more logically than Alexander. They were strong enough to seize Europe, yet they discovered Iceland and Greenland, which Europeans find uninhabitable, and reached the northern shores of America before Columbus. They expanded only within the limits of their natural geographic range, the northern seas.
I had always wondered at the evident relief with which a man comes down
…
You no sooner gain a height, spiraling upward like a bird, than you immediately drop like a stone, mistaking some utterly inedible piece of trash for a gopher. But I, too, could not stop: “The history of Russia begins with the Vikings.”
“Even though north, it wasn’t their geographic range,” the doctor said. “Russia Russianized them. Their regime ground to a halt.”
“As in the humorous saying,” I said. “
‘Come here—I’ve caught a bear, and he won’t let go.’
”
“That’s it, that’s it,” the doctor agreed.
“But why did the Tatars bog down in Russia?” I went on.
The doctor humphed, chewed a moment, and concluded, “The steppes ended.”
“Did you think that, or did I say it?” I exclaimed admiringly.
But he was lured no further by my admiration. He stopped, like Alexander, having gone too far in his confidences. He fell silent and gazed into the distance.
The sea, toward evening, had become utterly calm and still. Lacquered. As if replete and thicker than water. For a long time now, although I spent hours wandering beside it every day, I had not been seeing it
…
In addition to box gales, there were also “bottle gales,” which cast up bottles and flasks from whiskeys and gins I had never seen or drunk. There were “amber gales,” which cast up a crumb of amber on their last wave. For a long time I had only been looking under my feet, in the hope of finding a piece of amber “as big as a child’s head,” or a whole canister, or at least a flat little flask, but I had stubbornly failed to find anything of the sort with which the lounge at the research station was crammed (once they had found a keg of wine, still good, and once a large jar of black caviar, unfortunately already spoiled), not realizing that an ancestor was guiding me in these quests, that this was my excursion into man’s prehistoric niche
…
I found a “chicken god,” a stone with a hole in it—my ancestor might have worn it to protect his chickens—and that was all. For a long time, it turned out, I hadn’t been seeing the sea, hadn’t been looking up, had been settling rather rapidly into my forefather’s niche. The evening sea turned a grayish pink, fading opalescently toward the horizon, and there it melted away, ran dry, in a line so gentle it was revealed only by the delicate sharp stroke that defined a tiny steamboat. The sun was setting, implausibly large and red. I couldn’t tear my eyes away
…
I did—and saw at last, right under my nose, a Swedish beer crate made of dark cerise plastic, with three unfaded gold crowns on it.
Inspired by the crate, I turned homeward. “So be it. Good,” I reasoned. “If gathering was the ecological niche of primitive man, and if he has abandoned that niche, made his way up the pyramid of life to the very top, expanded his geographic range to its utmost, and crowded out all the other biological species to settle all the territories of the earth, then what is his niche now, his geographic range? What can we designate as the ecological niche of modern man? The planet earth itself? Can we express it that way?”
“That’s somewhat tautological.” The doctor shrugged. “But yes. If you like.”
All this was reminiscent of an experiment with Lorenz’s fish
…
They construct their little houses in opposite corners of the same aquarium and draw the property line straight down the invisible mathematical middle. If one neighbor trespasses, even accidentally, the other fills with fury and chases the trespasser—out of his own territory, all across the trespasser’s territory, and into his house-cum-fortress. In his own home the cowardly trespasser gathers rightful energy and darts out, extremely agitated, to pursue his instantly timid rival all across the aquarium, driving him, in turn, back into his house. Once there, the rival gathers strength
…
And so on. The pendulum of war, set to swinging by the chance violation of a boundary, is damped remarkably slowly. The enemies keep this up for hours, until the same invisible boundary has been defined. Then, after halting on it for a moment, nose to nose, they separate as if nothing had happened, nibbling grains of sand and pretending that they have simply come out to graze on the borders of their properties
…
Thus we ourselves illustrated what we were talking about.
“Good,” I said, tightening my grip and continuing to drive the doctor homeward. “Then from another angle”—the beautiful crate slapped rhythmically against my knee—“we can discuss the earth as a single ecological system, as the ecological niche on earth of life itself
…
” (The doctor had not objected so far.) “Can we say that by the moment when man appeared on earth the evolution of life, as it were, had also been completed?” (The doctor still said nothing
…
) “By that moment, the earth as a whole was a perfect, well-developed, reliable, definitively balanced ecological system, where everything was interrelated, forming a closed cycle which in no way disturbed the precision of the overall balance of life or the feasibility of constantly renewing the earth’s resources, and in which primitive man, the gatherer, fitted harmoniously and without wrecking anything yet. Is that right? So far, I’m not contradicting?”
“Yourself or me?” the doctor said in a bored voice, as if waving me off with his fin.
“Logic.”
No, that was another breed of fish, another game: in order to take up residence in his house, I was driving him into my own. For this I had to begin by moving out
…
“Man has abandoned his primitive niche, where he existed on an equal footing with the other species.” (By now I seemed to be saying this myself.) “Is it possible to say—this time not in the sense you reproached as tautological, but in a more adequate definition—that man’s ecological niche is precisely the ‘safety margin’ of the earth as the most general ecological system? That is, his niche is a certain interval in the earth’s existence, from the era of man the gatherer up to a world catastrophe that will result in the death of every thing alive? At the beginning of the century, there were one and a half billion of us. By the end, there will be six.
“Malthus again!” And again the sand gritted in the doctor’s teeth. “Space can’t be measured by time, as you are doing. Ecology studies only the ecological systems already extant. Only in this sense is it a science.”
“Man should feel somewhat awkward,” I said, as though the doctor and his ecology were to blame for all this, “if not ashamed: to be the crown of Creation, and understand this only as meaning that he was born to use Creation.”
“One doesn’t have to call our earth a creation. For the rest, however, I agree with you. There is a certain awkwardness. But we aren’t the only ones conscious of this nowadays, you know. There’s an obvious shift in awareness in this direction now—”
“You’re a scientist,” I said, bearing down. “A person who knows reality and assesses it soberly. Can you really believe that man is capable of stopping? So far, he’s just been gaining speed. Technical progress is a process, not a program. Man has long been a biological creature only in the three indisputable aspects you once mentioned to me. For the rest, he is no longer nature but her doom. Mankind is ruled by the laws of economics, not of biology. Even the conservation measures being undertaken now are economically disadvantageous, and I don’t think they’re any more effective, on the whole, than little old ladies from an English society for the preservation of animals—”
“You shouldn’t talk that way about little old ladies,” the doctor said. “Their work is nowhere near so trivial as you think.”
“Never mind,” I said sardonically, “the time may come for a society for the preservation of old ladies, too
…
Tell me honestly: which is more to your taste, a naked, icy earth over which the sun rises in vain, or
…
” I threw a sidelong glance at the sea. The enormous sun, as it neared the horizon, had acquired an irregular pear shape. The smooth water looked like scarlet silk
…
I pitied the sun, although in my predictions it survived. “Or a green earth inhabited by birds and beasts, with rivers and lakes full of fish, with man gathering roots, and perhaps with the wise dolphin, who didn’t start down our unwise path?”
“I understand your anti-humanist thought,” the doctor said dryly. “Don’t say aloud the rest of what you meant to ask me. Yes, I used to ask myself the same question
…
” The sun rolled faster and faster, like an apple, toward the horizon; it flattened out against the surface like a water drop; contrary to expectations, it failed to sizzle as it quickly slipped under, leaving on the water a unique gray light with a condensation of pink
…
“The question is devoid of meaning. Then there wouldn’t be anyone to look at this happiness—”
“Come, now!” I exclaimed. “You even say that? Surely everything alive on earth rejoices in life!”
“Yes, but only man is capable of appreciating its perfection in full measure—”
“But—”
“Don’t be too quick to drop the bomb you have in your heart. We don’t know everything. As for a hellish thought, even an unspoken one, we don’t know what else is factored in with it, or what form it will develop. Just now I made a confession to which I had no right as a scientist
…
” His faint smile still reflected the sunset.
Thus we reached agreement on the outlook for mankind, with no doubt that something depended on our decision. We groped for an exit from our own speculation. Sometimes it seemed to us
…
but every time, if we even came close to envisioning it as a reality, this path, too, would ripple and vanish into thin air. All measures were inadequate. Man positively refused to understand his true situation, for he was solely preoccupied with things that were immediately urgent, or seemed so to him. The present was breaking away from the future. Vanishing in this break was the dear past, the environment that had come to us by inheritance. We went so far as to set ecology up as a totalitarian government over mankind, where, in the medieval manner, a hand was chopped off for a chopped-off branch and a head was severed for the head of a jackrabbit. All this we did in the name of man
…
Only thus would
they
finally understand us!
…
“They” were everyone else but us. Upon sober assessment, our cabinet soon fell.