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"  &amp;quot;Get an eye even with her.&amp;quot; One of the things I love best in fiction is the presence of creatures, the whole panoply of biota with which we share the planet, the lovable and unlovable alike, kitten to cobra. &amp;quot;One does not meet oneself,&amp;quot; says Loren Eiseley, &amp;quot;until one catches the reflection in an eye other than human.&amp;quot; It has become a kind of aesthetic creed for me, in addition to being a moral precept. Any novel is enriched, I believe, by representing the mutual regard between ourselves and other species, the creaturely gaze back and forth across biological frontiers. The more you search for examples in great fiction, the more you find them. Think of the prairie-dog town in My Antonia (or the pack of wolves chasing a wedding sleigh in that same book). Think of Hemingway&amp;#039;s noble, foredoomed bulls; the kaleidoscopic presence of Nabokov&amp;#039;s butterflies; the convulsive beauty of Cormac McCarthy&amp;#039;s horses. Think of a certain rodent in Chapter One of Saul Bellow&amp;#039;s Herzog: &amp;quot;A rat chewed into a package of bread, leaving the shape of its body in the layers of slices. Herzog ate the other half of the loaf spread with jam. He could share with rats too.&amp;quot; Reading a trio of sentences like those, any writer must feel the stab of envy. What does Eiseley mean when he says that we only meet ourselves in eyes other than human? This: that it&amp;#039;s creatureliness which tells us most deeply and intimately who we are. That the species around us are the great teachers. (All the more reason to bewail the loss of so many owing to human wantonness, but that&amp;#039;s another essay.) Eiseley is saying that it was when Adam named the animals that we became human. Yet Adam&amp;#039;s task was not just naming but celebrating and is therefore a task we&amp;#039;ll never be finished with -- so long as we remain human. Edward O Wilson, the great Harvard entomologist, gave a name to this feeling of being allied to other species: biophilia, the idea that human beings, because they&amp;#039;ve evolved alongside everything else in nature, have a fundamental, biologically-rooted affinity for the rest of life and lifelike processes. I have struggled, in my own work as a fiction writer, to gather in the creature-life. Birds, horses, deadly mosquitoes, fireflies, a dog, a cat, a piglet, a weasel, a cottonmouth\u2014all these and more populate Tales out of School, my previous novel. Gabriel Geismar, the protagonist of my new novel, The Book of Getting Even, is guilty of having tormented insects as a child. Indeed, he particularly recalls what he perpetrated on a katydid and praying mantis one day found locked obscurely together (&amp;quot;Were they killing each other? Falling in love?&amp;quot;). He did what most little boys would do: took a rock and ground them to a uniform paste. This can be understood, not altogether whimsically, as the original sin on which my book is based\u2014the fall from grace precipitating my story. &amp;quot;Get an eye even with her&amp;quot;\u2014that&amp;#039;s the last sentence of the book. The &amp;#039;her&amp;#039; in question is a glow worm and the unexpected emotion the protagonist, Gabe, and the unexpected emotion Gabe feels for her is cosmic reverence. The place is the Vaucluse garden of J. Henri Fabre, greatest of nineteenth-century entomologists: &amp;quot;Alone as Adam before Eve, Gabriel believes\u2014against science\u2014that the insects knew he was coming this afternoon, knew they had an appointment with him and kept it. Something makes the moment holy rather than intelligible. The glory of the world, hidden awhile, shows itself again. All is foreseeable, all is all right, unmathematizable mystery for which the pilgrim speaks today his thanks. I am on my own but not alone, he says to earth and air. I&amp;#039;ll expect nothing more. There&amp;#039;s loneliness in this but it&amp;#039;s not altogether lonely. There&amp;#039;s pain in this but it&amp;#039;s not altogether painful. There&amp;#039;s whistling in the dark in this, but it&amp;#039;s not altogether scared. Here in this Eden, knowledge is not the opposite of innocence but its corollary. A contentment is provoked, a natural piety, by these things, stars, bugs, having nothing to do with us. How generous the arrangements are. Gabriel sinks down on hands and knees, the better to see a glow-worm bathing in the dust, filmed over with it. She turns on her lamp. Look your fill, Geismar. Cheek to the ground. Get an eye even with her.&amp;quot; Lest I give the wrong impression: Getting Even is overwhelmingly about people involved with one another rather than with creatures. It tells, like nearly all novels, a human-to-human tale. Many years after crushing those bright green things, however, and many miles away from where he started, and having worn out a number of hunches about life, my hero arrives finally at biophilia (even though he doesn&amp;#039;t call it that), a wisdom no amount of living can wear out. My hero can share with glowworms, too, and may even suspect that it is their descendants, not ours, who&amp;#039;ll one day inherit the earth. About the author: Benjamin Taylor is the author of the novels, Tales out of School and The Book of Getting Even, and the book of essays, Into the Open. In 2009 Penguin will publish The Letters of Saul Bellow, edited by Taylor. A longtime member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty at The New School, he has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College and the Graduate Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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