I Am a Strange Loop Read Online Free PDF

remember that exchange.

    What Is It Like to Be a Tomato?
    I slice up and devour tomatoes without the slightest sense of guilt. I do not go to bed uneasily after having consumed a fresh tomato. It does not occur to me to ask myself which tomato I ate, or whether by eating it I have snuffed an inner light, nor do I believe it is meaningful to try to imagine how the tomato felt as it was sitting on my plate being sliced apart. To me, a tomato is a desireless, soulless, nonconscious entity, and I have no qualms about doing with its “body” as I like. Indeed, a tomato is nothing but its body. There is no “mind–body problem” for tomatoes. (I hope, dear reader, that we agree on this much!)
    I also swat mosquitoes without a qualm, though I try to avoid stepping on ants, and when there is an insect other than a mosquito in the house, I usually try to capture it and carry it outside, where I let it go unharmed. I eat chicken and fish sometimes [Note: This is no longer the case — see the Post Scriptum to this chapter], but many years ago I stopped eating the flesh of mammals. No beef, no ham, no bacon, no spam, no pork, no lamb — no thank you, ma’am! Mind you, I would still enjoy the taste of a BLT or well-done burger, but for moral reasons, I simply don’t partake of them. I don’t want to go on a crusade here, but I do need to talk a little bit about my vegetarian leanings, because they have everything to do with souls.

    Guinea Pig
    When I was fifteen, I had a summer job punching buttons on a Friden mechanical calculator in a physiology lab at Stanford University. (This was back in those days when there was but one computer on the whole Stanford campus and few scientists even knew of its existence, let alone thought about using it for their calculations.) It was pretty grueling work to do such “number-punching” for hours on end, and one day, Nancy, the graduate student for whose research project I was doing all this, asked me if, for relief, I’d like to try my hand at other kinds of tasks around the lab. I said “Sure!”, and so that afternoon she escorted me up to the fourth floor of the physiology building and showed me the cages where they kept the animals — literally guinea pigs — that they used in their experiments. I still remember the pungent smell and the scurrying-about of all those little orange-furred rodents.
    The next afternoon, Nancy asked me if I would please go up to the top floor and bring down two animals for her next round of experiments. I didn’t have a chance to reply, however, for no sooner had I started to imagine myself reaching into one of those cages and selecting two small soft furry beings to be snuffed than my head began spinning, and in a flash I fainted right away, banging my head on the concrete floor. The next thing I knew, I was looking up into the face of the lab’s director, George Feigen, a dear old family friend, who was deeply concerned that I might have injured myself in the fall. Luckily I was fine, and I slowly stood up and then rode my bike home for the rest of the day. Nobody ever asked me again to pick animals to be sacrificed for the sake of science.

    Pig
    Oddly enough, despite that extremely troubling head-on encounter with the concept of taking the life of a living creature, I kept on eating hamburgers and other kinds of meat for several years. I don’t think I thought about it very much, since none of my friends did, and certainly no one talked about it. Meat-eating was just a background fact in the life of everyone I knew. Moreover, I admit with shame that in my mind, back in those days, the word “vegetarian” conjured up an image of weird, sternly moralistic nutcases (the movie The Seven Year Itch has a terrific scene in a vegetarian restaurant in Manhattan that conveys this stereotype to a tee). But one day when I was twenty-one, I read a short story called “Pig” by the Norwegian–English writer Roald Dahl, and this story had a profound