Life of Pi

by Yann Martel

The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity—it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.

The first time I went to an Indian restaurant in Canada I used my fingers. The waiter looked at me critically and said, “Fresh off the boat, are you?” I blanched.

My fingers, which a second before had been taste buds savouring the food a little ahead of my mouth, became dirty under his gaze. They froze like criminals caught in the act. I didn’t dare lick them. I wiped them guiltily on my napkin. He had no idea how deeply those words wounded me. They were like nails being driven into my flesh. I picked up the knife and fork. I had hardly ever used such instruments. My hands trembled. My sambar lost its taste.

I know zoos are no longer in people’s good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.

It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.

For good measure I added π = 3.14 and I drew a large circle, which I then sliced in two with a diameter, to evoke that basic lesson of geometry.

I was more afraid that in a few words thrown out he might destroy something that I loved. What if his words had the effect of polio on me? What a terrible disease that must be if it could kill God in a man.

It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them—and then they leap.

I’ll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane.

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO? An arrow pointed to a small curtain. There were so many eager, curious hands that pulled at the curtain that we had to replace it regularly. Behind it was a mirror.

Otherwise, to grab a wild guinea pig with your bare hands would be like taking hold of a knife by the blade.

Every animal has particular habitat needs that must be met.

All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.

Hediger (1950) says, “When two creatures meet, the one that is able to intimidate its opponent is recognized as socially superior, so that a social decision does not always depend on a fight; an encounter in some circumstances may be enough.” Words of a wise animal man.

What were those words he used that struck me? Ah, yes: “dry, yeastless factuality”, “the better story”.

Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.

“Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,” and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.

“Bapu Gandhi said, ‘All religions are true.’ I just want to love God,” I blurted out, and looked down, red in the face.

At the rate you’re going, if you go to temple on Thursday, mosque on Friday, synagogue on Saturday and church on Sunday, you only need to convert to three more religions to be on holiday for the rest of your life.”

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defence, not God’s, that the self-righteous should rush.

To me, religion is about our dignity, not our depravity.

“How many nations are there in the sky?”

“If there’s only one nation in the sky, shouldn’t all passports be valid for it?”

“I don’t understand it. We’re a modern Indian family; we live in a modern way; India is on the cusp of becoming a truly modern and advanced nation—and here we’ve produced a son who thinks he’s the reincarnation of Sri Ramakrishna.”

“Bapu Gandhi? The boy is getting to be on affectionate terms with Gandhi? After Daddy Gandhi, what next? Uncle Jesus? And what’s this nonsense—has he really become a Muslim?”

The water trickled down my face and down my neck; though just a beaker’s worth, it had the refreshing effect of a monsoon rain.

It was like Timbuktu, by definition a place permanently far away.

I’m sure even the adult viper, as it swallowed the mouse, must have felt somewhere in its undeveloped mind a twinge of regret, a feeling that something greater was just missed, an imaginative leap away from the lonely, crude reality of a reptile.

Simians are the clearest mirrors we have in the animal world.

That is why they are so popular in zoos.

The ecosystem on this lifeboat was decidedly baffling. Since there are no natural conditions in which a spotted hyena and an orang-utan can meet, there being none of the first in Borneo and none of the second in Africa, there is no way of knowing how they would relate.

that when brought together these frugivorous tree-dwellers and carnivorous savannah-dwellers would so radically carve out their niches as to pay no attention to each other.

The expression was haughty and severe, like that of an ill-tempered old man who has complaining on his mind.

I said to it, “Go tell a ship I’m here. Go, go.” It turned and sank out of sight, back flippers pushing water in alternate strokes.

different from the frozen anxiety of the first night in being a more conventional sort of suffering, the broken-down kind consisting of weeping and sadness and spiritual pain, and different from later ones in that I still had the strength to appreciate fully what I felt.

day. It was a placid explosion of orange and red, a great chromatic symphony, a colour canvas of supernatural proportions, truly a splendid Pacific sunset, quite wasted on me.

The largest one came at the boat quickly, as if to attack, its dorsal fin rising out of the water by several inches, but it dipped below just before reaching us and glided underfoot with fearsome grace.

She noticed me and expressed nothing about it. I was just another animal that had lost everything and was vowed to death. My mood plummeted.

the abomination of the moment was perfectly expressed.

When the sun slipped below the horizon, it was not only the day that died and the poor zebra, but my family as well.

I gave up on Orange Juice’s life before she even had a chance to defend it.

It looked the size of the planet Jupiter to my dazed senses. His paws were like volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I spent the night in a state of delirium.

But immobilizing darts don’t bring on sleep gently, like a good cup of tea; they knock out like a bottle of hard liquor straight up.

How I had failed to notice for two and a half days a 450-pound Bengal tiger in a lifeboat twenty-six feet long was a conundrum I would have to try to crack later, when I had more energy.

Look: Christ on the Cross died of suffocation, but His only complaint was of thirst. If thirst can be so taxing that even God Incarnate complains about it, imagine the effect on a regular human.

It seemed the presence of a tiger had saved me from a hyena—surely a textbook example of jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

I did not grasp all these details—and many more—right away. They came to my notice with time and as a result of necessity. I would be in the direst of dire straits, facing a bleak future, when some small thing, some detail, would transform itself and appear in my mind in a new light. It would no longer be the small thing it was before, but the most important thing in the world, the thing that would save my life.

I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.