In French Equatorial Africa, an idealist ecologist starts a campaign of public awareness to help save the African elephants from extinction.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.149595/mode/2up
https://ok.ru/video/1798915820212
In my life I’ve done more suffering than thinking— though I believe one understands better that way.
You see, dogs aren’t enough any more. People feel so damned lonely, they need company, they need something bigger, stronger, to lean on, something that can really stand up to it all. Dogs aren’t enough; what we need is elephants.
It seems that the elephants Morel was trying to save were purely imaginary and symbolic, a parable, as they say, and that the poor bastard was really defending the old human rights, the rights of man, those noble, clumsy, gigantic, anachronistic survivals of another age – another geological epoch. . .
you announce this salvation as coming soon – though I suppose that in the language of paleontology, which is not exactly that of human suffering, the word soon means a few trifling hundred thousands of years.
Earth was his kingdom, his place, his field— he belonged.
The lorry was literally stuffed with ‘trophies’: tusks, tails, heads, skins— an orgy of butchery.
De Vries, was certainly not collecting for museums, because most of them had been so riddled with shot as to be unrecognizable and in any case unsuitable for the pleasure of the eye.
I suppose there are things that nothing can kill and that remain forever intact. It’s as if nothing could ever happen to human beings. They’re a species over which it’s not easy to triumph. They’ve a way of rising from the ashes, smiling and holding hands.
“Well, I finally got an idea. When he fails, do like me: think about free elephant ride through Africa for hundreds and hundreds of wonderful animals that nothing could be built—either a wall or a fence of barbed wire—passing large open spaces and crush everything in its path, and destroying everything—while they live, nothing is able to stop them—what freedom! And even when they are no longer alive, who knows, perhaps continue to race elsewhere still free. So you begin to torment your claustrophobia, barbed wire, reinforced concrete, complete materialism imagine herds of elephants of freedom, follow them with his eyes never left them on their run and will see you soon feel better … “
years of isolation in the depths of the jungle have no power against a tenacious hope, and that a hundred acres of land at the height of the rainy season are easier to clear than are certain little intimate nooks of our soul.
she understood perfectly well how unconvincing this sounded, but she couldn’t help it: it was the truth.
He felt that, at his age, patience was ceasing to be a virtue and was becoming a luxury he could less and less afford.
He strove for one last time to look at the affair with all the detachment and all the serenity suitable to a man of science.
the immense sky, filled with absence.
with the impassive face of a man who feels perfectly sure of having the last word.
Of course to the pure all things are pure.”
“Every man is worthy of the name,” Orsini
repeated, almost with despair, with a last outburst of rage and scorn; and he was silent for a long time, as if to emphasize the enormity of such a claim. It proclaimed, also, he then went on, after taking a deep breath, that “the time for pride is finished, and that we must turn with far more humility and understanding toward the other animal species, “different, but not inferior” “Different, but not inferior,” Orsini re- peated again, with a kind of exasperated relish. And it went on like that; “Man on this planet has reached the point where really he needs all the friendship he can find, and in his loneliness he has need of all the elephants, all the dogs and all the birds . . Orsini gave vent to a strange laugh, a sort of triumphant sneer, entirely devoid of gaiety. “It is time to show that we are capable of preserving this gigantic, clumsy, natural splendor which still lives in our midst . . . that there is still room among us for such a freedom” He fell silent, but they could feel his voice lurking in the blackness, ready to hurl itself on the first prey that offered.
There you had a man, he resumed, who for months had been«going about the bush, who penetrated to the remotest villages and who, having learned several dialects while he fraternized with the natives, was devoting himself to an obstinate and dangerous work, undermining the good name of the white man. Western civilization was obviously being represented to the Africans as an immense bankruptcy from which they must at all costs try to escape. They were not far from being begged to go back to cannibalism as a lesser evil than modem science with its weapons of destruction, or from being encouraged to worship their stone idols, with which indeed, as if by chance, people like Morel were stuffing the museums of the world.
No, mademoiselle, I don’t capture elephants. I content myself with living among them. I like them. I like looking at them, listening to them, watching them on the horizon. To tell you the truth, I’d give anything to become an elephant myself. I’ll convince you that I’ve nothing against the Germans in particular: they’re just men to me, and that’s enough. . . . Give me a rum.”
“That hunting by fire was still practiced by the natives on a large scale, and it had been his lot to stumble on six baby elephants, victims of a fire from which only fully grown animals had managed to escape thanks to their size and speed? That whole herds of elephants sometimes escaped from the blazing savanna with bums up to their bellies, and that they suffered for weeks? Many a night he had lain awake in the bush listening to their cries of agony. That the contraband traffic in ivory was still practiced on a large scale by Arab and Asiatic merchants, who drove the tribes to poaching? Thirty thousand elephants a year— was it possible to think for a moment of what that meant, without shame? Did she know that a man like Haas, who was the favorite supplier of the big zc^s, saw half the young elephants he captured die under his eyes? The natives, at least, had an excuse: they needed proteins. For them, elephants were only meat. To stop them, they only had to raise the standard of living in Africa: this was the first step in any serious campaign for the protection of nature. But the whites? The so-called “civilized” people? They had no excuse. They hunted for what they called “trophies,” for the excitement of it, for pleasure, in fact.
The flame that attracted him so irresistibly burned him in the end. He was the first to recognize the enemy and to cry tally-ho, and he had gone on the attack with all the passion of a man who feels himself challenged by everything that makes too-noble demands upon human nature, as if humanity began somewhere around. thirty thousand feet above the surface of the earth, thirty thousand feet above Orsini. He was determined to defend his own height, his own scale, his own smallness.
“Listen to me,” he said. “All right, you’re a priest, a missionary. As such, you’ve always had your nose right in it I mean, you have all the sores, all the ugliness before your eyes all day long. All right. All sorts of open wounds— naked human wretchedness. And then, when you’ve well and truly wiped the bottom of mankind, don’t you long to climb a hill and take a good look at something different, and big, and strong, and free?”“When I feel like taking a good look at something different and big and strong and free,” roared Father Fargue, giving the table a tremendous bang with his fist, “it isn’t elephants I turn to, it’s God I”
The man smiled. He licked his cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. “Well, it isn’t a pact with the Devil I’m asking you to sign. It’s only a petition to stop people from killing elephants. Thirty thousand of them are killed each year. Thirty thousand, and that’s a small estimate. You can’t deny it . . . And remember—’there was a spark of gaiety in his eyes— “and remember, Father, remember: they haven’t sinned.”
He was stabbing me in the back, aiming straight at my faith. Original sin, and the whole thing— you know all that better than I do. You know me. I’m a man of action: give me a good case of galloping syphilis and I’m all right. But theory . . . this is between ourselves. Faith, God— I’ve got all that in my heart, in my guts, but not in my brain. I’m not one of the brainy ones. So I tried offering him a drink, but he refused.”
The Jesuit’s face lit up for a moment, and its wrinkles seemed to disappear in the youthfulness of a smile. Fargue suddenly remembered that he was rather frowned upon in his Order; he had several times been forbidden to publish his scientific papers; it was even whispered that his stay in Africa was not entirely voluntary He had heard tell that Father Tassin, in his writings, represented salvation as a mere biological mutation, and humanity, in the form in which we still know it, as an archaic species doomed to join other vanished species in the obscurity of a prehistoric past. His face clouded over: that smacked of heresy.”
“natives who were laughing with that light, eternal laughter which is their way of enduring all things
I don’t know where the English dug up all that damned self-assurance, but T imagine it’s just part of their sense of humor.
the odd thing is that, whether it s true or not, the consequences are the same: one large group of human beings or another turned out to be triple-distilled sons-of-bitches, which proves that we all have it in us
There’s one merit nobody will ever be able to take away from the Communists: that of having looked man in the face. They didn’t send him to Eton to learn protective coloration. Maybe the West is a civilization, but the Communists are an ugly truth about man. Don’t accuse them of inhuman methods: everything about them is human. We’re all one great, lovely zoological family, and we shouldn’t forget it. That’s how you came to be in the gutter Colonel and it’s no use your taking refuge
on an island and behaving like an ostrich— being English, I mean; the gutter is there, it’s you, or rather in you; it flows in your veins.
Have you ever seen a baby elephant lying on its side, with its tnink inert, gazing at you with eyes in which there seem to have taken refuge all those so highly praised human qualities of which humanity is so largely devoid?
that spark of misanthropy which most people carry in them, a presentiment of some different and better company than their own kind,
He had spent five years in the Sahara himself, at the head of a Camel Corps unit, and those years had been the happiest of his life.It was true that in the desert a man felt less lonely than elsewhere, perhaps because he lived there in constant, almost physical contact with the sky, and so had all the company he needed. For what remained, a pipe was enough.
He wanted to say all this to Haas, but his years in the desert hadn’t made him very talkative, and he also noticed that certain things which he felt deeply changed their meaning at the touch of words, so that he could no longer recognize them himself as he spoke. So that indeed he often wondered whether thinking were enough, whether thoughts were not a mere groping for something that was forever out of reach, whether days of real vision were not still ahead, and whether the mysterious cells which lay still unused in man’s brain would not, one day, lead toward light.
he felt less and less need to exchange ideas with other men, because essentially they no longer came to him as questions, but as certainties.
the man who changed species’ and of the last ‘fighter for dignity.’
Men are dying to preserve a certain splendor of life. Call it freedom, or dignity . . . They are dying to preserve a certain natural splendor.”
people who mistake their private neurosis for a philosophical outlook.”
Men are dying to preserve a certain splendor of life. Call it free- dom, or dignity . . . They are dying to preserve a certain natural .splendor.”
“He was convinced that if the attack on Omando had caused such interest in the world it was not so much because of the victim’s importance, but because fear, resentment and repeated disillusion in the age of slavery and radiation death had in the end branded the hearts of millions of human beings with an edge of misanthropy, which made them follow with sympathy, and perhaps some feeling of personal re- venge, the story of ‘‘the man who had changed species.” He turned toward Laurent with sympathy. It was difficult not to like that generous, slightly sing-song voice, not to like that black giant who spoke so frankly about himself when he thought he was speaking only of the African fauna.
inclined to a gentle skepticism which usually sufficed to protect him both against excessive illusions about human nature and against excessive doubt of it
a sort of Saint Francis of Assisi, only more energetic, more dashing, more muscular
he had the greatest respect for humor, because it was one of the best weapons ever forged by man for the struggle against himself.
devoured by some ravenous dream of hygiene and universal health
who desperately pursue a certain ideal of human decency, call it tolerance, justice or liberty
The idea, too, that people who have suffered too much aren’t any longer capable of … of complicity with you, for that’s what it amounts to. That they aren’t any longer capable of playing ball with us. The idea that they’ve somehow been spoiled once for all. It was partly on account of this idea that the German theorists of racialism preached the extermination of the Jews; they had been made to suffer too much, and therefore they could not be anything after that but enemies of the human race.
A man can’t spend his life in Africa without acquiring something pretty close to a great affection for the elephants. Those great herds are, after all, the last symbol of liberty left among us. It s something that’s fast disappearing, from more points of view than one. Every time you come upon them in the open, moving their trunks and their great ears, an irresistible smile rises to your lips. I defy anyone to look upon elephants without a sense of wonder. Their very enormity, their, clumsiness, their giant stature, represent a mass of liberty that sets you dreaming. They’re . . . yes, they’re the last individuals.
a trace of superiority, of condescension toward me, as though to point out to me that this was obviously something I could not understand, a private and secret world which I was not permitted to enter.
Yes, there are some among us who are fighting for the independence of Africa. But why? To protect the elephants. To take the protection of African fauna into their own hands. Perhaps for them elephants are only an image of their own liberty. That suits me: liberty always suits me. Personally, I have no patience with nationalism: the new or the old, the white or the black, the red or the yellow.
They aim between the eyes, just because it’s big, free and beautiful. That’s what they call a fine shot. A trophy.
people have been seized by such a need for friendship and company that the dogs can’t manage it. We’ve been asking too much of them. The job has broken them down— they’ve had it. Just think how long they’ve been doing their damnedest for us, wagging their tails and holding out their paws— they’ve had enough . . .’
It’s natural: they’ve seen too much. And the people feel lonely and deserted, and they need something bigger that can really take the strain. Dogs aren’t enough any more; men need elephants.
‘Look here, my friend, for three years I was a bus conductor in Paris. I recommend it during rush hours; it gave me what you might call a knowledge of human nature— a good, solid knowledge which prompted me to change sides and go over to the elephants.
there was around him an air of authenticity impossible to disregard: the authenticity of sheer physical nobility”
“I’ve always yearned to be a black man, to have a black man’s soul, a black man’s laughter. You know why? Because I thought you were diflFerent from us. Yes, I thought you were something special, something difiFerent on this sad earth of ours. I wanted to escape with you from the white man’s hollow materialism, from his lack of faith, his humble and frustrated sexuality, from his lack of joy, of laughter, of magic, of faith in the richness of after-life.
encouragement and signs of gratitude or recognition have been very few, if any, along my road.
If humanity can be compared to a tribe, then you may say I’m completely de-tribalized.
You love Negroes out of sheer misanthropy, because you think they aren’t really men.
in the end all human faces look alike
with nothing bright or hopeful around me, except those distant stars— and even there, let’s be frank: it’s only their distance that gives them that purity and beauty
ideals don’t die— obliged to live on shit sometimes, but don’t die!
the company a great cause always keeps: men of good will and those who exploit them
your skin, you know, is worth no more than the elephants’ hide. In Gennany, at Belsen, during the war, it seems we used to make lampshades out of human skin— for your information. And don’t forget, Monsieur Saint- Denis, that we Germans have always been forerunners in everything
‘Women,’ I concluded rather bitterly, ‘have at their command certain means of persuasion which the best- organized police forces do not possess.’
The number of animals who lived in cruel suffering, sometimes for years, with bullets in their bodies, wounds growing deeper and deeper, gangrenous and swarming with ticks and flies, could not be estimated
to change species, to come over to the elephants and live in the wilds among honest animals
Always cheerful, with the cheerfulness of a man who has gone deep down into things and come back reassured.
No one knew the desert better than Scholscher, who had spent so many nights alone there on the starlit dunes, and no one understood better than he did that need for protection which sometimes grips men’s hearts and drives them to give a dog the affection they dream so desperately of receiving themselves.
by ‘defending the splendors of nature . . .’ He meant liberty.”
Islam calls that ’the roots of heaven.’ and to the Mexican Indians it is of life’— the thing that makes both of
them fall on their knees and raise their eyes and beat their tormented breasts. A need for protection and company, from which obstinate people like Morel try to escape by means of petitions, fighting committees, by trying to take the protection of species in their own hands. Our needs- for justice, for freedom and dignity— are roots of heaven that are deeply imbedded in our hearts, but of heaven itself men know nothing but the gripping roots …”
. . . And that girl sitting there in front of him with her legs crossed, with her nylon stockings and cigarette and that silent gaze, in which could be read that stubborn need, not so different from what Morel had seen in the eyes of the stray dogs at the pound.
but not even all that was comic and childish about him could deprive him of the dignity conferred upon him by his love for his Maker.
that human mass whose physical strength was nothing compared to the faith and spirit that dwelt in him.
Three quarters of the Oul6 traditions and magic rites had to do with war or hunting
while it’s easy to suppress a magic tradition it’s difficult to fill up the strange voids which it leaves in what you call the primitive psychology and what I call the human soul
The roots of heaven are forever planted in their hearts, yet of heaven itself they seem to know nothing but the gripping roots
It must be very consoling to take refuge in cynicism and to try and drown your own remorse in a consoling vision of universal swinishness, and you can always”
“It must be very consoling to take refuge in cynicism and to try and drown your own remorse in a consoling vision of universal swinishness, and you can always try whisky, when that fails. For centuries those people were hunters, and now hunting has been taken away from them, without anything taking its place. When you separate people from their past without giving them anything in its place, they live with their eyes on that past . . . They’re not the ones to blame.”
“I believe Morel was defending a certain idea of decency— the way we are treated on this earth filled him with indignation. At bottom, he was an Englishman without knowing it. To cut a long story short — I suppose you came here to ask me for an explanation — it seemed to me quite natural that a British officer should be associated with that business. After all, my country is well known for its love of animals.”
Perhaps one day I shall even get the Nobel Prize— if, one day, they have a Nobel Prize for humaneness . .
They were all solid people who haven’t suffered enough, so they just couldn’t understand …
Thou art rich. Thy creature is poor. Thou art glorious and Thy creature is vile. Thou art measureless and Thy creature is contemptible. Thou art great and Thy creature is small. Thou art strong and Thy creature is weak. I thank Thee that Thou art Thou . .
They would shrug and call you a maniac— or even a humanitarian, a thing even more outmoded, backward, outdated, done with and anachronistic than the elephants. They would not understand. They had spent a few years in Paris, but they had still to undergo a real education —one which no school, lycee or university could supply: they had still to undergo their education in suffering. Then they’d be ready to understand what this was all about.
He was not effeminate, but like many youngsters in whom virility did not exclude gentleness, he must often have had to endure wounding jokes
His was a stubborn, desperate and yet triumphant reverie. He saw the face of his friend Kaj Munk, the pastor whom the Nazis had shot because he defended one of the most tenacious roots heaven had ever planted in the hearts of men— the root they called liberty.
We have no other aim than to stop the murder of animals that goes on in the African jungle and elsewhere
whoever amputated your poor soul did a thorough job of it”
INQUIRIM VITAE 
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