I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [218]
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,