Of Mice and Men
I have always liked mice, rodents of any kind actually but mice most of all. Despite my wife’s insistent protests to the contrary, I would someday like to have a pet mouse. I have always found a kind of sympathy in the little creatures, but I had not until recently stopped to ask myself why I felt such a strange kinship with such an oft-hated household pest.
By way of aside, I have named this section ironically and topically, but I must encourage my readership visit the originator of this phrase, the poem “To a Mouse,” by Robert Burns. If you have not been forced in sophomore English to suffer through Steinbeck’s novella, I recommend against it.
Perhaps it was the sentimentalist in me, but I always found the way people treated and talked about mice to be disheartening, even perhaps a bit cruel. Most people have no compunctions about using hinge traps and glue to detain the poor terrified creatures until they finally gnaw their limbs off to get free, or maybe worse, remain stuck until the householder chances to notice them and promptly bludgeons them to death. They casually speak of how they want to eradicate them, not unlike the mosquito (a creature which, try as I might, I can feel no sympathy towards). I have sometimes wondered to myself if we were going about this all wrong, and if some kind of symbiosis would be preferable, rather than treating the entire species as hostis humani generis. One of the more charming little details of Lewis’s Elwin Ransom appears in That Hideous Strength when he summons a small troop of mice to eat the leftovers from he and Jane’s meal. It seems that at St. Anne’s all the creatures, from Mr. Bultitude the Bear down to the mice, live in precisely this kind of harmony, as equally at home as the people. It is a restoration of the “social union” alluded to by the speaker of Burns’s poem:
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion Has broken Nature’s social union, An’ justifies that ill opinion, Which makes thee startle, At me, thy poor, earth-born companion, An’ fellow-mortal!
And yet, when I really drill down as to what I see in mice, I must confess that I see in them a kind of reflection of the human race. Naturally, I am not the only one, because mice have been used for generations now as test subjects in experiments, specifically to model things like human anatomy and human social dynamics. The haunting results of the Mouse Utopia experiments wouldn’t seem so chilling, of course, if we didn’t see ourselves in their tiny, helpless bodies.
That is what I think mice mean to me. They hold up a mirror to Man, and show him that, past his pretensions, he is really only a bigger version of a mouse: fragile and scared, yes, but also curious, and resourceful, and at their core very social.
Therefore, to have a little mercy on the mouse is to have a little mercy on Man.
Worse than a Materialist, a Forgetful Faerie
I was pondering, the other day, the idea of Faeries, and the oft-floated concept that mankind is becoming more and more immune to seeing them because he has, in essence, lost that sensitive faculty by which they were once perceived through disuse. This strikes me as probably true, because I think it rather reasonable to believe in them, and yet I myself have never seen them, and because I have only come around to thinking about the Fair Folk in adulthood, I fear that I may be forever blind in that capacity.
Nevertheless, another thought occured to me, one that I felt was quite morbid. What if the Faeries themselves have a sense analogous by which they perceive or do not perceive us? And what if it is the case that the woods of the world, long unexplored by any serious-hearted men sensitive to wonder (let alone children unaccompanied by anxious caretakers), have been so depopulated of people that the Faeries have long since stopped seeing us, even when such a one does happen to wander by a woodland stream on a sunny spring morning? What if men, being materialists, have lost sight of the spirits of nature, and yet by a dark reversal those same spirits, being so long without human company, have begun to consider us nonexistent? Surely they are the happier, in whatever pockets of the world we have let remain with them, but for men it spells a double forlornment: perhaps we cannot see or be seen by the intelligences behind the winds and the leaves and the April buds. A man who has lost his sight can yet grope in the dark to find his way, but what if there is nothing to feel?