We human creatures have no fewer faults than do the animals; we certainly behave no better often than the beasts. Our spirits, too, are fashioned from the same material stuff as theirs. I’ll prove what I propound.
If, during twilight’s interregnum before the break of dawn, I climb a tree and, like a god dispensing lightning bolts, shoot dead some unsuspecting rabbit, oh! what panic then is wreaked among the rest! One moment, calmly munching thyme; the next, stampeding to their cities underground. —But soon the danger is forgotten, and their fear evaporates without a trace. Returned within my deadly range, they graze more blithely than before!
Aren’t people just like rabbits? Shipwrecked by some storm, they go again, as soon as they have dried, to brave the winds and seas. True rabbits, foolishly, forgetfully, and trustfully we put ourselves in fortune’s uncompassionate hands.
“True dogs,” I might with equal justice say. Consider how unwelcoming are dogs to straying dogs, and how they bark and bite and chase away the interlopers from their territory.
People too protect their vested interests—goods, grandeur, or glory—as ferociously as dogs. The newcomer to novelism’s robbed or ripped apart as readily as one to coquetry! There’s only so much cake to go around; therefore the fewer mouths, the more each eats!
I could adduce still more and more examples. But breviloquence is blessed. All the greatest authors made, and lived by, this acutest observation: Leave something to the reader’s imagination.