I Am a Strange Loop Read Online Free PDF Page B

effect on my life — and through me, on the lives of other creatures as well.
    “Pig” starts off lightly and amusingly — a naïve young man named Lexington, raised as a strict vegetarian by his Aunt Glosspan (“Pangloss” reversed), discovers after her death that he loves the taste of meat (though he doesn’t know what it is that he’s eating). Soon, as in all Dahl stories, things take weird twists.
    Driven by curiosity about this tasty substance called “pork”, Lexington, on the recommendation of a new friend, decides to take a tour of a slaughterhouse. We join him as he sits in the waiting room with other tourists. He idly watches as various waiting parties are called, one by one, to take their tours. Eventually, Lexington’s turn comes, and he is escorted from the waiting room into the shackling area where he watches pigs being hoisted by their back legs onto hooks on a moving chain, getting their throats slit, and, with blood gushing out, proceeding head downwards down the “disassembly line” to fall into a cauldron of boiling water where their body hair is removed, after which their heads and limbs are chopped off and they are prepared for being gutted and sent off, in neat little cellophane-wrapped packages, to supermarkets all over the country, where they will sit in glass cases, along with other rose-colored rivals, waiting for purchasers to admire them and hopefully to select them to take home.
    As he is observing all this with detached fascination, Lexington himself is suddenly yanked by the leg and flipped upside down, and he realizes that he too is now dangling from the moving chain, just like the pigs he’s been watching. His placidity all gone, he yells out, “There has been a frightful mistake!”, but the workers ignore his cries. Soon the chain pulls him alongside a friendly-looking chap who Lexington hopes will grasp the situation’s absurdity, but instead, the gentle “sticker” grasps Lexington’s ear, pulls the dangling lad a bit closer, and then, smiling at him with lovingkindness, deftly slits the boy’s jugular vein wide open with a razor-sharp knifeblade. As young Lexington continues his unanticipated inverted journey, his powerful heart pumps his blood out of his throat and onto the concrete floor, and even though he is upside down and losing awareness rapidly, he dimly perceives the pigs ahead of him dropping, one by one, into the steaming cauldron. One of them, oddly enough, seems to have white gloves on its two front trotters, and he is reminded of the glove-clad young woman who had just preceded him from the waiting room into the tour area. And with that curious final thought, Lexington woozily slips out of this, “the best of all possible worlds”, into the next.
    The closing scene of “Pig” reverberated in my head for a long time. In my mind, I kept on flipping back and forth between being an upside-down oinking pig on a hook and being Lexington, spilling into the cauldron…

    Revulsion, Revelation, Revolution
    A month or two after reading this haunting story, I accompanied my parents and my sister Laura to the city of Cagliari, at the southern end of the rugged island of Sardinia, where my father was participating in a physics conference. To wind up the meeting in grand local style, the organizers had planned a sumptuous banquet in a park on the outskirts of Cagliari, in which a suckling piglet was to be roasted and then sliced apart in front of all the diners. As honored guests of the conference, we were all expected to take part in this venerated Sardinian tradition. I, however, was deeply under the influence of the Dahl story I had recently read, and I simply could not envision participating in such a ritual. In my new frame of mind, I couldn’t even imagine how anybody could wish to be there, let alone partake of the piglet’s body. It turned out that my sister Laura was also horrified by the prospect, and so the two of us stayed behind in our hotel and were