Ishmael (Ishmael, #1)

by Daniel Quinn

I didn’t want a guru or a kung fu master or a spiritual director. I didn’t want to become a sorcerer or learn the zen of archery or meditate or align my chakras or uncover past incarnations. Arts and disciplines of that kind are fundamentally selfish; they’re all designed to benefit the pupil—not the world.

In Hermann Hesse’s The Journey to the East, we never find out what Leo’s awesome wisdom consists of. This is because Hesse couldn’t tell us what he himself didn’t know. He was like me—he just yearned for there to be someone in the world like Leo, someone with a secret knowledge and a wisdom beyond his own. In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can’t be found on a shelf in the public library. But I didn’t know that then.

Was it some embalmed Yeti or Bigfoot, made of cat fur and papier-mâché? Was it the body of a UFOnaut cut down by a National Guardsman before he could deliver his sublime message from the stars (“We are brothers. Be nice.”)?

It was, of course, a koan—meant to be inexplicable. It disgusted me for that reason, and for another reason: because it appeared that this magnificent creature beyond the glass was being held in captivity for no other reason than to serve as a sort of animate illustration for this koan.

The most fundamental difference was that in Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven’t known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.

Ishmael thought for a moment. “Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?” “Which want to destroy it? As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world.” “And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world.” “Yes, that’s so.” “Why don’t you stop?” I shrugged. “Frankly, we don’t know how.” “You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.” “Yes, that’s the way it seems.”

“You must have seen films of the prewar rallies, with hundreds of thousands of them singing and cheering as one. It wasn’t terror that brought them to those feasts of unity and power.” “True. Then I’d have to say it was Hitler’s charisma.” “He certainly had that. But charisma only wins people’s attention. Once you have their attention, you have to have something to tell them. And what did Hitler have to tell the German people?” I pondered this for a few moments without any real conviction. “Apart from the Jewish business, I don’t think I could answer that question.” “What he had to tell them was a story.” “A story.” “A story in which the Aryan race and the people of Germany in particular had been deprived of their rightful place in the world, bound, spat upon, raped, and ground into the dirt under the heels of mongrel races, Communists, and Jews. A story in which, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, the Aryan race would burst its bonds, wreak vengeance on its oppressors, purify mankind of its defilements, and assume its rightful place as the master of all races.” “True.” “It may seem incredible to you now that any people could have been captivated by such nonsense, but after nearly two decades of degradation and suffering following World War I, it had an almost overwhelming appeal to the people of Germany, and it was reinforced not only through the ordinary means of propaganda but by an intensive program of education of the young and reeducation of the old.” “True.” “As ...