Free Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban Page B

people on the street are young. I don’t want to sit in my room. I don’t want to do anything particularly.
    Actually we’re all swimmers, we’ve all come from the ocean. Some of us are trying to find it again.
    Eliade says in his book on shamanism:
    In the beginning, that is, in mythical times, man lived at peace with the animals and understood their speech. It was not until after a primordial catastrophe, comparable to the ‘Fall’ of Biblical tradition, that man became what he is today – mortal, sexed, obliged to work to feed himself, and at enmity with the animals. While preparing for his ecstasy and during it, the shaman abolishes the present human condition and, for the time being, recovers the situation as it was in the beginning. Friendship with animals, knowledge of their language, transformation into an animal are so many signs that the shaman has re-established the ‘paradisal’ situation lost at the dawn of time.
    That’s the crux of it: abolishing the present human condition. Shamans wear bird costumes and they fly. Somehow they experience flying. They’re gone and they come back with answers. Could I abolish the human condition? Could I swim, experience swimming, finding, navigating, fearlessness, unlostness? Could I come back with an answer? The unlostness itself would be the answer, I shouldn’t need to come back.

18

Neaera H.
    More and more I feel that I ought not to have forced myself into that man’s turtle thoughts. Perhaps he wasn’t even going to do anything about them, perhaps I’ve precipitated a harmless fantasy into an active crisis. None of us can be sufficiently sensitive. We feel our own pain wonderfully well but seldom attribute agony to others. When we were talking there were moments when his face made me think of the John Clare poem about the badger hunted out of his den by men and dogs and taken to the town and made to fight until he was dead. There’s a line in which he ‘cackles, groans, and dies’. William G. looked as if he might be going to cackle.
    I wonder about myself. Why didn’t I simply write a turtle letter to
The Times
and let it go at that? Certainly I’ve felt like taking some kind of action but I’m not sure I’ll feel that way when the time comes. And now I’ve committed myself with this stranger. I have breached my own privacy as well as his and almost I wish I hadn’t. How on earth are we going to get through all those hours together driving to and from Polperro? I don’t think either speech or silence will be comfortable. I feel terribly uneasy about the whole thing. I haven’t even considered any of the physical problems of getting the turtles into the ocean. I haven’t been practical about it at all.
    I’m
not
committed actually. At any rate I needn’t be. For years now I’ve had only myself and I must be economical with that self. I can simply say that I hadn’t quite understood what we were talking about when he rings me up. Or I can be up tomy neck in work which is always true. I’m rather a cheerful person as long as the minutes of my days buzz at home like well-domesticated bees. When I come and go too much I’m afraid that they may fly away to swarm elsewhere. I think there still are people in Norfolk who tell the bees when the owner of the hive has died, even pin a bit of crape to the hive so the bees can mourn. When they’ve done their mourning they get on with making honey. One only owns the hive I suppose, never really the bees. Not like cattle.
    Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it like Ahab with the White Whale. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone. Even in matriarchal societies I doubt that there were ever female Beowulfs. Women lie with gods and demons but they don’t go looking for monsters to fight with. Ariadne gave Theseus a clew but the Minotaur was his business. There