121
" Suddenly Morel had felt something strike against his cheek and fall at his feet. He lowered his eyes cautiously, taking care not to lose his balance. It was a may-beetle. It had fallen on its back and was waving its legs, trying in vain to turn over. Morel stopped and stared fixedly at the insect at his feet. He had been at the camp a year, and for the last three weeks he had been carrying the sacks of cement
for eight hours a day on an empty stomach. But this was something impossible to let pass.
He bent his knee, keeping the sacks balanced on his shoulder, and with a movement of his forefinger placed the insect on its feet again. He did so twice more in the course of that journey. [...]
From that moment practically all the political prisoners assisted the insects, while the common criminals passed by with curses. During the twenty minutes’ break they were allowed, not one of the political prisoners gave way to exhaustion, and
yet that was when they usually threw themselves to the ground and lay without stirring till the next whistle. But this time they seemed to have found new strength. They wandered about with their eyes fixed on the ground in search of insects to help.
It did not last long, of course. Sergeant Gruber arrived on the scene. [...] Immediately he had understood what was happening. He had recognized the enemy. He had known immediately that he was face to face with a scandalous provocation, an affirmation of unbroken spirit and faith, a proclamation of dignity, totally inadmissible in men reduced to zero. "
― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven
127
" But, my dear child,' I stammered, I don’t see how the desire to preserve the African fauna . . She broke in on me: ‘Oh, to hell with the African fauna! Can’t you see what the real question is? The question is simply whether you have confidence in yourselves, in your good sense, in your reason, in your ability to prevail, yes, to prevail. Out there in the bush is a man who believes in you, a man who believes you’re capable of kindness, of generosity, of ... of a ... of a great love, in which there’d be room even for herds of elephants, and . . . and even for the most wretched dog alive! "
― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven
133
" Your generation is suffering from what for lack of a better word I shall call over-debunk. There was a lot of debunking that had to be done, of course. Bigotry, militarism, nationalism, religious intolerance, hypocrisy, phonyness, all sorts of dangerous, ready-made, artificially preserved false values. But your generation and the generation before yours went too far with their debunking job. You went overboard. Over-debunk, that's what you did. It's moral overkill. It's like those insecticides Rachel Carson speaks of in her book, that poison everything, and kill all the nice, useful bugs as well as the bad ones, and in the end poison human beings as well. In the end, it poisons life itself, the very air we breathe. That's what you did, morally and intellectually speaking. Yours is a silent spring. You have overprotected yourselves. You are all no more than twenty, twenty-two years old, but yours is a silent spring, I'm telling you. Nothing sings for you any more. "
― Romain Gary , خداحافظ گاری کوپر
135
" To the white man the elephant had long meant merely ivory, and to the black man it always meant merely meat — the most abundant quantity of meat that a lucky hit with the assagai could procure for him. The idea of the 'beauty' of the elephant, of the 'nobility' of the elephant, was the idea of a man who had had enough to eat, a man of restaurants and of two meals a day and of museums of abstract art — an idea typical of a decadent society that takes refuge in abstractions from the ugly social realities it is incapable of facing, and makes itself drunk on vague and twilight notions of the beautiful, of the noble, of the fraternal, simply because the purely poetic attitude is the only one which history allows it to adopt. Bourgeois intellectuals insisted that a society on the march and in full spate should encumber itself with elephants simply because in that way they themselves hoped to escape destruction. They knew that they were just as anachronistic and cumbersome as these prehistoric animals; it was just a way of claiming mercy for themselves, of asking to be spared. Morel was typical of them.
But to human beings in Africa, the elephant’s only beauty was the weight of his meat, and as for human dignity, that was first and foremost a full belly. Perhaps, when the African does have his belly full, perhaps then he too will take an interest in the beauty of the elephant and will in general give himself up to agreeable meditations on the splendors of nature. For the moment, nature spoke to him of splitting the elephant’s belly open and plunging his teeth into it and eating, eating till he dropped, because he did not know where the next morsel would come from. "
― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven
138
" But from the height where we were I could see, on the other side of the ravine that hid the stream, a whole part of the forest quivering as though shaken by a cruel fear, and the tops of the trees suddenly tilting, and falling like feathers; and then I saw them, packed closely against one another, the great gray shapes I knew so well. I thought: Soon there will be no more room in the modem world for such need of space, for such royal clumsiness, such magnificent freedom. And I could not help smiling, as I did each time I saw them, with relief, as though the sight of them reassured me about an essential presence. In this age of impotence, this age of taboos, of slavery, inhibitions, and almost physiological submission, when man is triumphing over his most ancient truths and renouncing his deepest needs, it always seemed to me, as I listened to the earth’s most ancient thunder, that we had not yet been finally cut off from our sources, that we had not yet lost ourselves forever, that we had not yet been once for all castrated and enslaved, that we were not yet altogether subdued. "
― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven
