17 September 2012

Of cruelty

Looked at casually, day-old puppies are little, blind, squirming, undifferentiated objects of things. I put one of them in the bucket of water, and instantly an extraordinary, terrible thing happened. This blind, amorphous thing began to fight desperately for its life, struggling, beating the water with its paws. I suddenly saw that it was an individual, that like me it was an 'I', that in its bucket of water it was experiencing what I would experience and fighting death, as I would fight death if I were drowning in multitudinous seas. 
-- Leonard Wolf quoted by Sarah Bakewell

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