A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

I know your species tends to look down on our world, considering it brutal, cannibalistic and deceitful […]. But among us there had always been, from the beginning, a sense of equality. […] Perhaps this is a concept difficult for you to grasp, but there was a mutual respect amongst us. Eating another animal was not grounds for despising it; and being eaten did not instill in the victim – or the victim’s family – any exaggerated admiration for the dining species.

Noah – or Noah’s God – changed all that. If you had a Fall, so did we. But we were pushed. […] Noah – or Noah’s God – had decreed that there were two classes of beast: the clean and the unclean.

We had survived. We had stowed away, survived and escaped – all without entering into any fishy covenants with either God or Noah. We had done it by ourselves. We felt ennobled as a species. That might strike you as comic, but we did: we felt ennobled. That Voyage taught us a lot of things, you see, and the main thing was this: that man is a very unevolved species compared to the animals. We don’t deny, of course, your cleverness, your considerable potential. But you are, as yet, at an early stage of your development. We, for instance, are always ourselves: that is what it means to be evolved. We are what we are, and we know what that is. […] One moment you bark, one moment you mew; one moment you wish to be wild, one moment you wish to be tame.

You aren’t too good with the truth, either, your species. You keep forgetting things, or you pretend to. […] I can see there might be positive side to this wilful averting of the eye: ignoring the bad things makes it easier for you to carry on. But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that bad things never happen.

[…] For instance, you won’t even admit the true nature of Noah, your first father […]. I gather that one of your early Hebrew legends asserts that Noah discovered the principle of intoxication by watching goat get drunk on fermented grapes. What a brazen attempt to shift responsibility on to the animals […]. Blame someone else, that’s always your first instinct. And if you can’t blame someone else, then start claiming the problem isn’t a problem anyway.

Here the manuscript in the Archives Municipales de Besançon breaks off, without giving details of the annual penance or remembrance imposed by the court. It appears from the condition of the parchment that in the course of the last four and a half centuries it has been attacked, perhaps on more than one occasion, by some species of termite, which has devoured the closing words of the juge d’Église.

Listen, she said, so instead of burying the reindeer they’re now painting a big blue stripe down the carcasses and feeding them to mink. I think they should have buried them. Burying things gives you a proper sense of shame. Look what we’ve done to the reindeer, they’d say as they dug the pit. Or they might, at least. They night think about it. Why are we always punishing animals? We pretend we like them, we keep them as pets and get soppy if we think they’re reacting like us, but we’ve been punishing animals from the beginning, haven’t we? Killing them and torturing them and throwing our guilt on to them?

German radio announced that since no country would agree to accept the boatload of Jews, the Fatherland would be obliged to take them back and support them. It was not difficult to guess where they might be supported. What’s more, if the St Louis was forced to unload its cargo of degenerates and criminals back in Hamburg, this would prove that the world’s supposed concern was mere hypocrisy. Nobody wanted the shabby Jews, and nobody therefore had any right to criticize whatever welcome the Fatherland might extend to the filthy parasites on their return.

You might acknowledge God on paper forms just as you deferred to senior officers around the base; yet the moment you were most you, when you were really Spike Tiggler, the kid who’d grown up from a borrowed car on a quiet road to a roaring fighter in an empty sky, was when you’d climbed hard and were levelling out your silver wings, high up in the clear air south of the Yalu River. Then you were wholly in charge, and you were also most alone. This was life, and the only person who could let you down was yourself.