The information is extracted from the Internet; [South Africa] J.M. Coetzee, Classic Literary Works Sharing, Gansu
The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
Glass slaughterhouse
10974 words
[South Africa] J.M. Coetzee
(Click here to view the author's bio)
One
In the wee hours of the morning, he was woken up by the ringing of the phone. It was his mother who called. He was now accustomed to late-night phone calls: his mother had a strange routine, and he thought that the rest of the world lived as strangely as she did.
"How much do you think it will cost to build a slaughterhouse, John? It's not the kind of large, just build a model room and use it for demonstration. ”
"What are you demonstrating?"
"Demonstrate what happens in the slaughterhouse, which is slaughter. It occurred to me that people tolerate the slaughter of animals only because they have never seen any slaughter. Never seen, heard, smelled. It occurred to me that if there was a slaughterhouse in the middle of the city, where everyone could see, smell, and hear, people might change their attitudes. A glass slaughterhouse with glass walls. What do you think? ”
"You're talking about building a real slaughterhouse where animals are slaughtered and subjected to real death?"
"Yes, it's true all the time. As a kind of presentation. ”
"I think the chances of you getting a permit to build this thing are almost zero. Leaving aside the fact that people don't want to know where the food on the plate comes from, how do you deal with blood? When the animal's throat is cut, blood splatters, sticky, dirty, and attracts flies. No local authority will endure the bloodshed of their cities. ”
"It's not going to bleed. It was just a slaughterhouse for display. Only a few animals are killed every day. For example, a cow, a pig, six or seven chickens. You can cooperate with nearby restaurants to kill and sell. ”
"Don't think about it, Mom. It's impossible for you to get this idea off the ground. ”
Three days later, he received a package in his mailbox. There was a whole bunch of paper inside: news cut out of a newspaper; some photocopies; a diary with a handwritten label from the mother that reads "Diary 1990-1995"; Some documents bound together. The package had a brief note: "Take a look at this pile of things for me when you have time, and tell me if you think you can make something out of them." ”
One of the documents is entitled "Glass Slaughterhouse". The article begins with a quote:
In the Middle Ages and early modern society, city administrators tried to prohibit the slaughter of animals in public places. They saw the slaughterhouse as an unpleasant nuisance and made several attempts to drive them all out of the city walls.
– Keith Thomas
The words unpleasant nuisance are underlined with a horizontal line.
He skimmed through the document. It included a slaughterhouse design plan with a layout drawing, which was more detailed than what my mother had mentioned on the phone. Attached to the layout are photographs of hanger-like buildings, presumably the current slaughterhouses. In the middle of the ground there is a truck transporting livestock, empty, without a driver.
He called his mother. It was four o'clock in the afternoon on his side and nine o'clock in the evening on his mother's side: a reasonable time for both of them. "The documents you sent have arrived," he said, "can you tell me what to do with them?" ”
"I was in a panic when I sent the papers," his mother said, "and it occurred to me that if I died tomorrow, some ignorant cleaning lady from the countryside might sweep everything off my desk and burn it on fire." So I decided to pack them up and send them to you. You can leave it alone. I'm not panicking anymore. When people get older, it's normal for fear to strike suddenly. ”
"So, Mom, you're saying there's nothing wrong, nothing I should know? Is it all just a wave of fear? ”
"Yes."
Two
That night, he took out the diary and flipped through it. The first few pages are an article entitled "Djibouti, 1990". He sat down and read.
"I was in Djibouti in northeastern Africa," he reads, "and once I went to the bazaar, I saw a young man, like most of the people in this land, he was very tall. He was naked, with a beautiful little goat in his arms. The pure white goat sat calmly on top of the man, looking around and enjoying the ride.
"There was a place behind the market stall where the floor and stones were stained dark red with blood, almost completely black. It was a barren place, not a single weed, not a single blade of grass. It was a slaughterhouse where goats, sheep and poultry were slaughtered. And the man was about to bring his goats into this slaughterhouse.
"I didn't follow them. Because I know what's going to happen, I've seen it and don't want to watch it again. The young man would wave at one of the butchers, who would take the baby goat from his hand, wrap it around its four legs, and hold it to the ground. The young man would pull the knife from the thigh-slapping scabbard, slit the goat's throat neatly, and watched it tremble and bleed.
When the goat finally stopped moving, the young man would cut off his head, cut open his abdomen, take out his entrails and put them in a tin basin carried by the butcher, thread a wire through his ankle, hang it on a pole on the side, and peel off his sheepskin. Then he would cut him in half, take the two lambs and the sheep's head with a pair of dull eyes, and walk towards the market. With a bit of luck, the carcass of a sheep can be sold for 900 Djiboutian francs or 500 dollars.
"When the meat buyer takes it home, the two lambs are cut into small pieces and roasted over coals, and the sheep's head is boiled in a large pot. It is mainly bones that cannot be eaten, which will be thrown to dogs to eat. And that's how he ended. The proud days of the goat's life will be gone, as if he had never existed. No one will remember him but me, a stranger who happened to see him on his way to death, and was seen by him.
"The stranger, who has not forgotten him to this day, now wants to ask two questions of his ghost. First of all: what were you thinking about that morning when you were carried to the market, in the arms of your master? Don't you really know where he's taking you? Can't you smell blood? Why don't you try to escape?
And the second question is: what do you think the young man was thinking on his way to the market—after all, he had known you since the day you were born, and that you were one of the sheep he had to take out every morning to forage for food and bring home in the evening? Did he whisper an apology for what he was going to do to you?
"Why am I asking these questions? For I want to know what you and your brothers and sisters think of the deals that your ancestors made with humanity many generations ago. According to this deal, humans promise to protect you from natural predators such as lions and jackals. In return, your ancestors promised that when the time came, they would give their bodies to their protectors to eat. And their children and grandchildren will have to do so for generations to come.
"In my opinion, this is a bad deal, too costly for your people. If I were a goat, I would prefer to survive under the mouth of a lion wolf. But I'm not a goat and don't know how goats think things. Maybe that's what the goats thought: maybe I could have escaped the fate that fell on my parents and grandparents. Maybe the goat's way of thinking is to live in hope.
Or maybe the goat's brain isn't working. We must seriously consider this possibility, as certain philosophers – philosophers of humanity – have done. Philosophers say that goats don't think, strictly speaking. No matter what kind of mental activity the goat has, if we can enter it, it will be unrecognizable, extremely alien and incomprehensible to us. Hopes, expectations, premonitions—goats don't have these spiritual forms. The goat would kick and struggle until the last moment when he saw the knife unsheathed, not because he suddenly realized he was dying, but simply a simple reaction of disgust to the strong smell of blood, to the stranger who grabbed his leg and held him.
"If you're not a philosopher, it's hard to believe that a goat, a creature that looks like us in many ways, can go about its life without thinking about it. One consequence of this is that, when it comes to the slaughterhouse, we civilized Westerners always do our best to postpone the discovery of the truth by the goat, sheep, pig, or cow, trying not to frighten it, until at last, when he sets foot in the slaughtering ground and sees the stranger with the knife splattered with blood, he inevitably becomes terrified. The ideal scenario we envision is to knock the animal unconscious so that it is unable to think, so that it never understands what is happening. So that it does not realize that the time has come to pay for its life, and that the time has come to fulfill the ancient transaction that included it. So that its last days on earth will not be filled with doubt, confusion, and fear. So it dies 'without pain,' as they say.
"Among the domestic animals, we used to castrate the males. Castration without anesthesia is much more painful than cutting the throat, and the pain lasts much longer, but no one performs songs and dances for castration. What, then, makes us feel that the pain of death is unacceptable? More specifically, if we intend to kill each other, why do we want each other to be free from suffering? What is the kind of mortal pain that we can't accept other than death itself?
"There's a word in English called squeamish, which my Spanish dictionary translates as impresionable. In English, the neurotic and the soft-hearted form a contrast. A person who is reluctant to see a beetle trampled on can be described as 'soft-hearted' or 'neurotic', depending on whether you appreciate that person's sympathy for the beetle or think the thought is silly. Workers in slaughterhouses use the word 'neurotic', not 'soft-hearted', when discussing those who care about animal welfare and advocate that animals should die without pain or fear. Most of them defy these animal rights activists, and they are all dead, said the slaughterhouse worker.
"Do you want to spend the last moments of your life full of pain and fear? Animal rights activists questioned the slaughterhouse workers. We are not animals, and the slaughterhouse worker replied that we are human. It's not the same thing. ”
Three
He put his diary aside and began to flip through other documents, most of which appeared to be reviews of books or essays by different writers. The shortest one is entitled Heidegger. He had never read Heidegger, but he had heard that his books were extremely obscure. What would his mother say about Heidegger?
"When talking about animals, Heidegger perceives that their access to the world is limited, even deprived, and he uses the German word arm, which means 'poor'. This poverty is absolute, not in comparison with us human beings. Although Heidegger is speaking of animals in a general sense, there is reason to believe that when he made this comment, he had in mind creatures such as lice and fleas.
By the word impoverished, he seems to want to show that the world experience of animals is necessarily limited compared to our world experience, because they cannot act autonomously, but can only respond to stimuli. The senses of lice may function, but they can only respond to specific stimuli, such as a smell in the air or a tremor in the ground (which indicates the proximity of an endothermic). And for the rest of the world, lice can react as deaf and dumb. This is why, in Heidegger's terminology, lice are poor in the world, that is, in the absence of the world.
"What about me? I can substitute my own perception into the presence of a dog, or I believe I can. But can I substitute for the presence of lice? Can I share the nervousness of the lice as it struggles to smell and hear the approach of what it desires? Do I want to follow Heidegger's guidance and compare the stimulating, single-minded mental intensity of the lice with my scattered human consciousness that is constantly sliding from one object to another? What's better? Which one do I prefer? Which one would Heidegger himself prefer?
When Hannah Arendt was his student, Heidegger had a well-known or notorious affair with her. In the surviving letters he wrote to her, he said nothing about their intimacy. Still, I would like to ask: what does Heidegger seek through Hannah or other mistresses if it were not for the moment of mental intensity in which consciousness concentrates itself on that stimulus before extinction?
"I try to treat Heidegger fairly. I tried to learn from him. I tried to understand his esoteric German vocabulary and obscure German thoughts.
Heidegger argues that for animals (e.g., lice), the world is made up of specific stimuli (smells, sounds, etc.) on the one hand, and all things that are not stimuli and therefore may not exist. Based on this, we can think that animals (lice) are enslaved - it is not the smell and sound itself that enslave them, but the appetite for blood that signals the smell and sound when approached.
"Utterly enslaved by appetite is clearly not in keeping with the reality of higher animals, whose curiosity about the world around them goes far beyond the object of their appetite. But I want to avoid talking about high and low. I wanted to understand Heidegger as a person, and like a spider, I threw a web of my curiosity at him.
"Enslaved by its appetites, Heidegger says that the animal cannot act in and above the world, to be precise: it can only manifest, and only within the world limited by the limits of its senses, the limits of its senses. Animals cannot understand the other as themselves, and cannot understand the other within themselves; The Other can never reveal itself to the animal as it is.
"Why is it that every time I spill my thoughts (like a spider) and try to understand Heidegger, I see him lying in bed with his fleshy student on a rainy Thursday afternoon in Württemberg, both naked under a large German duvet? The mating was over, and they lay side by side, she was listening, and he chattered about whether the world was a stimulus for the animal, a tremor of the ground or a smell of sweat, or nothing, blank or non-existent. He talked, she listened, and tried to understand him with sincerity for his teacher and lover.
"It is only to us, he says, that the world reveals itself as it is.
She turned to him and caressed him, and all of a sudden, he was congested again. He couldn't stop wanting her, and he couldn't help but want to eat her. ”
Nope. His mother's three-page essay on Heidegger came to an abrupt end. He flipped through the papers, but he couldn't find the fourth page.
He called his mother on the spur of the moment: "I just finished reading your essay on Heidegger. I think it's funny, but what is it? Fiction? Or is it a fragment of a discarded manuscript? What can I do with it? ”
"I think you could call it a discarded manuscript," replied his mother, "and it was serious at first, and then it went sour." I always run into this problem when I write things now. It starts with one thing, but ends with another. ”
"Mother," he said, "you know very well that I am not a writer or an expert in the study of Heidegger. If you send me a story about Heidegger and then want me to tell you what to do with it, I can only say sorry that I can't help. ”
"But don't you think there's some kind of germ of thought in there? This man believes that lice's experience of the world is scarce, even worse than deprivation, and he believes that lice have no awareness of the world other than constantly sniffing the air while waiting for the blood source to arrive. Yet, he himself longs for the ecstasy moments that reduce his consciousness of the world to nothingness, and lose himself in the carnal carnival of thoughtless ......? Don't you see the irony in this? ”
"Yes, Mom. I see your sarcasm. But isn't the point you're making cliché? Let me tell you about it. Unlike insects, we humans have a divisive nature. We have both animal desires and rationality. We want to live a rational life – Heidegger wants to live a rational life, Hannah Arendt wants to live a rational life – but sometimes we just can't do it, because we are conquered by desire from time to time. When we were conquered, we chose to give in, and we surrendered. Subsequently, when the desires are satisfied, we return to rational life. What else is there to say? ”
"It depends, my child, it depends. Can we, you and I, talk like adults? We all know what it means to live with our senses, don't we? ”
"You go on."
"Think about the moments we're talking about, the moments when you're in the same room with your true lover, the person you really want, and think about the moments of union. At that moment, where is your so-called rationality? Is it completely erased? At that moment, are we indistinguishable from blood-sucking lice? Or is it that behind all this, the spark of reason is still flickering, not extinguished, waiting for the moment to burn again, waiting for you to remove your body from your lover's body and resume your own life? If it's the latter, when the body is out of control and entertaining itself, what does the spark of reason do to itself? Is it anxiously waiting to reveal itself again, or is it the opposite, full of sorrow, wanting to extinguish and die, but not knowing what to do? For—as one adult will say to another—isn't it that little enduring flash of reason, of reason, that inhibits us from reaching the top? We want to be part of our animal instincts, but we can't. ”
"So what?"
"So I think Martin Heidegger, the man who wants to be proud of being human, the ein Mensch, the person who tells us how he built his world, the weltbildend, and that we can be as weltbildend, is actually not completely sure that he wants to be human. At some point, he couldn't help but wonder if it would be better to be a dog, a flea, and give himself to the stream of existence from a bigger perspective. ”
"I can't keep up with you anymore. Stream of existence, what does that mean? Explain. ”
"It's the rapids, the floods. Heidegger has hints at what this stream of being is about what it is, but he chooses to reject it. He even called it the experience of the world of scarcity. In his view, scarcity is due to the fact that those experiences have not changed. How ridiculous! He sat at his desk and wrote. Das Tier benimmt sich in einer Umgebung, aber nie in einer Welt: Animals act (or behave) in the environment but not in the world. He stopped writing. Someone is knocking on the door. It was the knock he had been listening to as he was writing, and he was sensitive to it. Hannah! My lover! He tossed the pen aside. Here she comes! His heart is coming! ”
"And then?"
"It's gone. I can't push it even one step further. Everything I send you looks like this. I can't go any further. Something was missing in my mind. I used to be able to push ideas forward, but now I seem to have lost that ability. The gears are jammed and the lights are going out. The machine I used to rely on to take me to the next step doesn't seem to be working anymore. But don't panic. It's natural – nature tells me in this way it's time to go home.
This is another experience that Martin Heidegger did not think to reflect on: the experience of dying, the experience of being absent from the world. It's a self-contained experience. If he's here, I can tell him about that—at least about its early manifestations. ”
Four
A day later, he opened his mother's diary, this time stopping on the last one, which was July 1, 1995.
"Yesterday I went to a lecture by a guy named Gary Steiner about Cartesian philosophy and its ongoing influence on the way we think about animals, especially the educated among us. (Descartes is remembered to say that humans have rational souls while animals do not.) From this, it can be seen that animals have the ability to feel pain but not the ability to suffer. According to Descartes, pain is an unpleasant bodily perception that can trigger an automatic response such as crying or roaring; Suffering is a different matter, it is more advanced, it is a human thing. ）
"I thought the lecture was interesting, but Professor Steiner went on to talk about the details of Descartes' anatomical experiments, and I suddenly felt like I couldn't listen to it anymore. He described Descartes' experiments on a live rabbit, which I reckon was tied or nailed to a wooden board so that it would not move. Descartes used a scalpel to cut open the rabbit's ribcage, cutting off the rabbit's ribs one by one and moving them away to reveal the beating heart. Then he made a small incision in his heart so that for a second or two before the heart stopped beating, he could observe the valve system that pumps blood.
"I can't take Professor Steiner's words anymore. My mind drifted elsewhere. I wanted to kneel, but it was a lecture hall, and the seats were so close together that there was nowhere to kneel. I said 'borrow, borrow, borrow' to the people next to me and walked out of the lecture hall. In the empty hall, I can finally kneel and ask for forgiveness, on behalf of myself, on behalf of Mr. Steiner, on behalf of René Descartes, and on behalf of all of us murderers. A poem, an ancient prophecy rings in my ears:
A dog starved to death under its owner's door
Heralding the collapse of a nation.
A horse was abused on the road
Appeal to Heaven to pay the debt with human blood.
The cry of a hare when it is hunted
Tearing at every nerve in the brain......
Who will hurt a small wren
No one deserves to be loved......
Moths don't fight, butterflies don't kill
Because the final judgment is at hand.
A dog starved at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.
A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry from the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear...
He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be beloved by men...
Kill not the moth nor butterfy
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.
"The Last Judgment! What mercy will Descartes' rabbit, the rabbit who died for the cause of science three hundred and seventy-eight years ago today, and who has been in God's hands since the day his chest was dissected, show us? What kind of mercy should we receive? ”
He, John, the son of the woman who knelt down in July 1995 and prayed for forgiveness, and then wrote the words he had just read, took out his pen. At the bottom of one of the pages, he wrote: "A fact about rabbits, which has been scientifically confirmed. When the fox's jaw is close to the rabbit's neck, the rabbit goes into shock. That's how nature arranged, or God – if you prefer to talk about God – so that the fox could tear open the rabbit's belly and live by eating its entrails, while the rabbit felt nothing, nothing at all. There is no pain, and there is no suffering. He drew a line under the words a fact about rabbits.
His mother has not revealed any intention of returning her diary. But fate is unpredictable. Maybe he will die before his mother, like when he is hit by a car while crossing the street. If so, in exchange, she will have to read his thoughts.
Five
The thickest of the documents sent by my mother was related to Marianne Dawkins's book "Why Animals Matter" — a book review or draft of a book review.
"The word important in the title is confusing," he reads, "and nothing is theoretically important." Theoretically, either everyone is all important or none of them are important. What Dawkins is trying to convey is why animals are important to humans.
"What is written in the book is an example from Dawkins's research, about the animal mind, the human mind (the question of animals is only one of many questions that human beings think about, and it is certainly not a matter of life and death). Do animals have real thoughts, she asks, like our minds? How do we answer such a question scientifically?
Her answer was: To answer this question scientifically, we must first ask this question scientifically. The latter, on the other hand, requires us to document the behavior we intend to explain, and then explore a series of hypotheses that might explain such behavior within the rational framework of our minds.
"And I put myself in the position of the animal that Dawkins is judging. Are you determined to know if I'm sane, or is it the other way around, just a biological machine, a machine made of flesh and blood? To do this, you put me through an experiment that you dictate the form of. It will be a scientific experiment, characterized by rationality, skepticism, hypothesis testing, etc. I am presumed to be irrational unless I, the person on trial, can prove otherwise, (and in fact it is only possible for you to act in my interests). If you could give me two alternative hypotheses about how I behaved during my experiments (which was really just how you observed me to behave), you would choose the simpler one if you followed your scientific method.
"What I want to ask is: With so many factors at stake against me in this matter of life, what hope can I have for you to believe that I am sensible?"
He put aside the article that wrote about Gins. It was late, and he was tired, but his eyes were drawn to a document with the words "Darston" on the top page, cursive in bold black capital letters.
"I am not a man who loves animals," he reads, "and animals don't need my love, and I don't need theirs." Human love is obscure enough. How do humans choose the object of love? I don't know anything. Why is it full of contradictory riddles? I don't have a clue. It can be seen that the feelings of animals are even more difficult for us to understand! No, I have no interest in love, I only care about the issue of justice.
"Still, I've always believed that I'm able to get close to the animal to a certain extent – what should I call it? - The inner world. Not the minds that approach them, nor their emotions, but the tendencies of their inner state, their state of mind, and perhaps not even the 'internal' state relative to the 'external' state, for I suspect that neither the mind nor the body are independent of each other for the animals, or even for us. But I always believed that I had access to the world within, so I treated the animals with whom I intersected as if I had the access. That's what I did when I wrote them, of course.
"Animals: what a confusing term! Aside from the fact that they are not human, what do grasshoppers and wolves have in common? Is the wolf more like a grasshopper or more like me?
"As I said, I believe I can get close to the inner world of wolves, grasshoppers, and other wild animals. How? With the ability to empathize, in my non-scientific opinion, this ability is innate. We are born with this ability, and I prefer to call it the power of the soul rather than the power of the mind. We can choose to cultivate this ability, or we can choose to let it wither.
This brings us to the conceptual historian Lorraine Darston. The person I doubted the most was Duston. She gives a historical framework to people like me, who believe they have the gift of seeing the world through the eyes of others.
Broadly speaking, Darston's view is as follows: We humans have the ability to withdraw ourselves from ourselves and compassionately commit ourselves to the minds of others—what she calls the ability to change perspectives—and that belief in this ability is not at all innate, nor universal, but in fact originated in the West at the end of the eighteenth century, a period in the history of Western philosophy that seems to see subjectivity as the essence of thought, in a field that was then called moral science. The pattern of this perspective has both beginnings and ends.
My response to Darston's view is that the essence of thought, mental experience, is of course subjectivity. I think, therefore I am: I exist because I think I am conscious, not because abstract thoughts exist. I think, and my thinking belongs only to me, it is stained with my personality, my subjectivity, it goes deeper than thought. Could there be a more obvious truth than that?
"What puzzles me about Darston's conceptual reasoning is that she introduces angels into the discourse. Just as we used to think that beasts were lower in spirit than humans, we also thought that gods or angels had a higher mental hierarchy than humans, she said. In Thomas Aquinas's angelology, angels possess an intuitive intellect that is able to comprehend in a split second the full consequences of any set of premises before them. It is as if to say that for the angelic mind, all mathematics is extended in a single light that is self-evident.
"In contrast to the thinking of angels, our human wisdom trudges through logical deduction step by step, and often goes astray halfway. Even with the aid of its boastful capacity for compassion, how can the inferior human mind have the luxury of having the wisdom of angels and the perspective of angels?
"Do angels exist? Who knows? Duston's arguments are not based on whether they actually exist or not. She was saying that a long time ago, there were people like Aquinas who were able to conceive other types of minds without assuming that humans had a capacity for empathy that would plunge themselves into the mode of being of others.
"What particular lesson did Duston teach me? She made me understand that I could understand the minds of animals with the power of compassion and compassion, and that this unthinking assumption only revealed the fact that I was a product of my own time, born in a time when paradigms of a particular perspective were dominating, and that I was too ignorant to escape from it. This is a lesson to be learned, if I choose to accept it. ”
Six
He didn't read any further. It was one o'clock in the morning on his side and six o'clock in the morning on his mother's side. She was most likely still sleeping. However, he picked up the phone anyway.
He prepared a speech: "Mom, thank you for this bundle of papers. I've read more than half of it, and I'm sure I've figured out what you're trying me to do. You want me to forge these messy pieces of disconnection into shape and somehow put them together. But you know as well as I do that I don't have the talent to do such things. So tell me, what the hell is going on here? Is there something you don't dare tell me? I know it's early in the morning, and I'm sorry about that, but please open up to me. Is something wrong? ”
There was a long silence. When his mother finally spoke, it was very crisp and bright.
"Very well, I'll tell you. I'm not myself anymore, John. Something is wrong with me, something is wrong with my brain. I became very forgetful. I couldn't concentrate. I've seen my doctor and he wants me to go to the city for a check-up. So I've made an appointment with a neurologist. But at the same time, just in case, I'm trying to organize my life.
"I can't even describe to you how messy my desk is. It's just a small part of what is sent to you. If something happens to me, the cleaning women will throw them all in the trash. Maybe that's where they're supposed to be. But driven by human vanity, I insisted that something of value could be distilled out of it. Does that answer your question? ”
"And what do you think is wrong with you?"
"I'm not sure. Like I said, I've become very forgetful. I forgot about myself. I found myself standing in the street, not knowing why I was there or how I got there. Sometimes I even forget who I am. It was a terrible experience. I felt like I was losing my mind, and that's to be expected. Because the brain is degraded as matter, and reason cannot be separated from the brain, it also degenerates. Anyway, that's what happened to me. I can't work, I can't think in a bigger way. If you decide that you can't handle those files at all, that's okay, just keep them in a safe place.
"But since you've called, let me tell you about what happened last night.
"There was a show on TV about factory breeding. I don't usually watch these kinds of shows, but for some reason, I didn't turn off the TV.
"The show is about a chick factory — a place where eggs can be fertilized, they are artificially hatched, and male and female are determined.
"The procedure goes like this: the day after birth, when the chicks are able to stand on their own feet, they are placed on a conveyor belt to feed, which carries them slowly past the worker, whose job it is to check their sex. If the inspection results show that you are female, you will be transferred to a box and sent to the laying workshop, where you will spend your prolific life as a laying hen; If you're male, you'll stay on the conveyor belt. At the end of the conveyor belt, you will be poured into a chute. At the end of the chute is a pair of gears that grind you into a paste and then chemically sterilize you to turn you into cow feed or fertilizer.
"On last night's show, there was a camera that followed one of the chicks on a conveyor belt. So that's life! You can see him talking to himself, it's confusing, but so far it's not too difficult. A pair of hands then lifted him up, parting the fluff between his thighs and placing him back on the conveyor belt. So much to check! He said to himself, I seem to have passed that item just now. The belt rolled forward, and he rode bravely on it, facing the future and all the challenges it contained.
"This set of images lingers in my mind, John. All those hundreds of millions of chicks came to this beautiful world, were allowed to live for a day by our gifts, and then they were crushed into meat sauce just because they were born of the wrong sex, because they didn't fit into the business plan.
"For the most part, I don't know what I believe. My past beliefs seem to have been replaced by fog and chaos in my head. However, I still hold fast to one last belief: there is a reason why the chick on the screen appeared before my eyes last night, and that he and other insignificant beings intersect with mine on their own paths to their own deaths.
"That's why I wrote those things. Their lives are too short and too easily forgotten. If I didn't think about God, I was the only one in the entire universe who remembered them. By the time I'm gone, their lives will be blank. It's as if they never existed. That's why I wrote them, and that's why I wanted you to read them. In order to pass on their memories to you. That's all. ”
Translated by Yuanzi
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