83
" 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
85
" 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
87
" As I say, I knew him well: it was I who, twenty years before, had got him his first scholarship in Paris. I had several times, in those distant days, sent him money taken from my own meager pay, in response to pressing letters, and of course
he had never forgiven me for that. I did not blame him: I preferred ingratitude to servility. Later — much later — he had toured my territory as a member of Parliament and, on his return to Brazzaville, had had a great deal to say about me:
apparently, I wasn’t doing anything to ‘free the backward tribes from the servitude of the past/ In that, too, he was right: I am in no hurry to do so. On the contrary, I have a more and more irresistible longing not only to preserve intact the customs and rites of the African forest, but sometimes even to share in them myself. "
― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven
95
" Е, добре, накрая ми хрумна една идея. Когато вече не издържате, правете като мен: мислете си за свободните слонове, препускащи през Африка, за стотиците и стотици прекрасни животни, на които нищо не може да се опре - нито една стена, нито една ограда от бодлива тел, - които преминават огромни открити пространства и трошат всичко по пътя си, и събарят всичко - докато са живи, нищо не е в състояние да ги спре - каква свобода, а! И дори когато вече не са живи, знае ли човек, продължават навярно да препускат другаде все така свободно. Така че, започне ли да ви измъчва клаустрофобията, бодливата тел, железобетонът, пълният материализъм, представете си стада слонове на свобода, проследете ги с поглед, не се откъсвайте от тях, от техния бяг и ще видите, веднага ще ви стане по-добре... "
― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven
