Animals

I have encountered a piece of writing – sent to me by a beloved friend – which I wish to share here. It is very brief and it concerns animals. A gentleman named Henry Breston, of whom I know nothing, wrote it in 1928. And so it goes:

'We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from the universal nature and living by complicated artifice, a man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having form so far below ourselves. And therein we err and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complex than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.'

'They move finished and complete.'  Oh that I could say that of myself.  Amen.