I Am a Strange Loop

A month or two after reading this haunting story, I accompanied my parents and my sister Laura to the city of Cagliari, at the southern end of the rugged island of Sardinia, where my father was participating in a physics conference. To wind up the meeting in grand local style, the organizers had planned a sumptuous banquet in a park on the outskirts of Cagliari, in which a suckling piglet was to be roasted and then sliced apart in front of all the diners. As honored guests of the conference, we were all expected to take part in this venerated Sardinian tradition. I, however, was deeply under the influence of the Dahl story I had recently read, and I simply could not envision participating in such a ritual. In my new frame of mind, I couldn’t even imagine how anybody could wish to be there, let alone partake of the piglet’s body. It turned out that my sister Laura was also horrified by the prospect, and so the two of us stayed behind in our hotel and were very happy to eat some pasta and vegetables.

The one–two punch of the Norwegian “Pig” and the Sardinian piglet resulted in my following my sister’s lead in completely giving up meat-eating. I also refused to buy leather shoes or belts. Soon I became a fervent proselytizer for my new credo, and I remember how gratified I was that I managed to sway a couple of my friends for a few months, although to my disappointment, they gradually gave up on it.

In those days, I often wondered how some of my personal idols — Albert Einstein, for instance — could have been meat-eaters. I found no explanation, although recently, to my great pleasure, a Web search yielded hints that Einstein’s sympathies were, in fact, toward vegetarianism, and not for health reasons but out of compassion towards living beings. But I didn’t know that fact back then, and in any case many other heroes of mine were certainly carnivores who knew exactly what they were doing. Such facts saddened and confused me.

Reversion, Re-evolution

The very strange thing is that only a few years later, I, too, found the pressures of daily life in American society so strong that I gave up on my once-passionate vegetarianism, and for a while all my intense ruminations went totally underground. I think that the me of the mid-sixties would have found this reversal totally unfathomable, and yet the two versions of me had both lived in the very same skull. Was I really the same person?

Several years passed this way, almost as if I had never had any epiphany, but then one day, when I was a beginning assistant professor at Indiana University, I met a highly thoughtful woman who had adopted the same vegetarian philosophy as I once had, and had done so for similar reasons, but she had stuck to it for a longer time than I had. Sue and I became good friends, and I admired the purity of her stance. Our friendship caused me to think it all through once more, and in short order I had swung back to my post-“Pig” stance of no killing at all.

Over the next several years there came a few more oscillations, but by my late thirties I had finally settled into a stable state — a compromise representing my evolving intuition that there are souls of different sizes. Though it was anything but crystal-clear to me, I was willing to accept the vague idea that some souls, provided they were “small enough”, could legitimately be sacrificed for the sake of the desires of “larger” souls, such as mine and those of other human beings. Although drawing the dividing line at mammals was clearly somewhat arbitrary (as any such dividing line must be), that became my new credo and I stuck with it for two more decades.

The Mystery of Inanimate Flesh

We English speakers do not eat pig or cow; we eat pork and beef. We do eat chicken — but we don’t eat chickens. One time the very young daughter of a friend of mine exclaimed with great mirth to her father that the word for a certain farm bird that clucks and lays eggs was also the word for a substance that she often found on her plate at dinnertime. She found this a most humorous coincidence, similar to the humorous coincidence that “calf ” means both a young cow and a part of one’s leg. She was upset, needless to say, when she was told that the tasty foodstuff and the clucky egg-layer were one and the same thing.

Presumably we all go through much the same confusion when, as children, we discover we are eating animals that our culture tells us are cute — lambs, bunnies, calves, chicks, and so forth. I remember, albeit dimly, my own genuine childhood confusion at this mystery, but since meat-eating was such a bland commonplace, I usually swept it under the rug and didn’t give it much thought.