Black Milk - Elif Shafak [31]
“Hey, yo, Big Self. Wassup?” says one of them, forcing a smile.
The second woman takes her hands off her adversary, and makes a sign of peace. “Good to see you, Sister.”
I frown from one to the other. “Little Miss Practical! Miss Highbrowed Cynic! What are you doing here?”
These two have been on a collision course for as long as I’ve known them. At first glance, they both seem to embrace reason and rationality. But that is as far as their similarities go. While Little Miss Practical wants to overcome every challenge in a pragmatic way, Miss Highbrowed Cynic isn’t interested in easy solutions. The former wants to solve things as quickly as possible while the latter opts for a detailed, complicated, philosophical approach. Where one prefers to be clear and concise, the other favors ambiguity and abstraction. One likes answers, the other prefers questions.
Without a further word, I pick them up by the napes of their necks and place one on each of my shoulders. In this fashion, I walk back toward the Bosphorus. It doesn’t take long before another line of amateur fishermen appears before us.
“Look at those fishermen,” says Little Miss Practical, craning her head from where she sits on my left shoulder. “They’re wack. How many fish do they think they’ll catch like that? They stand there for hours, and go back home with a couple of sad rockfish in their buckets. In the time they spend here, they could work and earn real cheddar. They could buy a huge salmon!”
“What do you know?” Miss Highbrowed Cynic says, with a snort, from my right shoulder. “What can any pragmatist know about philosophy, art and literature, and the things that make life worth living?”
“What have fishermen got to do with that?” asks Little Miss Practical.
“Fishing’s got to do with that,” comes the answer. “It is the perfect way to contemplate the endless mysteries of the universe.”
I nod in agreement, but the truth is, I don’t understand the fishermen either. How does it feel, and what kind of state of mind does it require, not to rush, not to push? What level of humility does it take to be satisfied with what you have, and be happy to go home with two flimsy fish in a plastic bucket at the end of a long day?
Of all the prophets, it is Job who, on some level, I cannot empathize with—Job who, according to the Qur’an, is the symbol of patience, humbleness and peaceful surrender. I have never understood how he doesn’t get angry, not even upset, in the face of the ordeals God puts him through, and remains ever thankful, ever accepting.
Unaware of my thoughts, Miss Highbrowed Cynic continues her dissertation. “Many books have fishermen as their central characters.”
“What books?” asks Little Miss Practical. There is nothing about awakening the fisherman within in her enormous self-help collection.
“Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter!”
“What the hell was that?”
Miss Highbrowed Cynic raises her voice over the incipient hum of the city. “I said: Your knowledge is nothing when no one else knows that you know.”
“Poser!” hisses Little Miss Practical.
“My point is, how can you follow Melville’s adventures of Ishmael and Captain Ahab, and not contemplate our tiny little place in this universe? What about Hemingway’s epic battle of wills between the old fisherman and the giant fish he longs to catch? And take Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Fisherman of the Inland Sea—you will be thinking twice as hard as you ever have about the roles of good and evil. You see how fishing is intertwined with philosophy?”
“All right, all right, I get the point. While you’re at it, you might want to tell the philosophers over there something about efficiency,” says Little Miss Practical. “There must be, what, thirty of them. Why don’t they, say, rent a fishing boat together? Then, when they go out to sea and cast their nets, their output would increase tenfold.”
Miss Highbrowed Cynic heaves a sigh. “Fishing has depth. It has wisdom.