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The Most Basic Things
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…I remember reading that an Englishman who had killed a monkey in India could not forget the look he gave him when he died, and since then he did not kill another monkey.
Just like Wilhelm Harris… who, to simply have some pleasure, traveled through the interior of Africa in 1836 and 1837. In his travels, published in Mumbai in 1838, he recounts that, having killed the first elephant, which was a female, and when the next morning he was looking for the slaughtered animal, all the elephants in the surroundings had fled: only the son of the slaughtered one had spent the night with his dead mother; then, forgetting all fear, went out to meet the hunters with the most vivid and clear expression of his inconsolable grief and surrounded them with its tiny trunk to ask for help.
So, Harris says, he was moved by real remorse for his action and had the feeling of having committed murder.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
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My client (I want to say “my friend” but I get paid) sat in their shower chair, slumped over, letting the hot water run over their back and letting me scrub their scalp with soapy suds, and they moaned. They moaned with relief and pleasure. They were able to let go and enjoy that super simple but wonderful sensation of hot water warming their skin, muscles and bones. And of being…
