Let me in! Let me in! I love you so much I could eat you! I love you to the very core—especially the soft, juicy parts; the vitals most tender and alive. Surrender to this agony and you will be transformed into me. Dying to yourself, you will become alive as me. We shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, on the morning when the last trumpet sounds. For behold, I am he that stands at the door and knocks.
The gull isn’t rapacious or greedy. It’s just that his being alive at all is the same thing as eating crabs. Sea birds are transformations of fish. Men are transformations of wheat, chickens, and steers. And a love for the food is the agony of the food. To object to this inseparability of pleasure and pain, life and death, is simply to object to existence. But, of course, we cannot help objecting when the time comes.
Of course we can’t return to the unreflective consciousness of the animal world without becoming animals. To be human is precisely to have that extra circuit of consciousness which enables us to know that we know, and thus to take an attitude to all that we experience. The mistake that we’ve made—and this, if anything, is the fall of man—is to suppose that that extra circuit, that ability to take an attitude to life as a whole, is the same as actually standing aside and being separate from what we see. We seem to feel that the thing which knows that it knows is one’s essential self. That, in other words, our personal identity is entirely on the side of the commentator. We forget that self-consciousness is simply a subordinate part and instrument of our being; a sort of mental counterpart to the finger-thumb opposition of the human hand.