Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary

‘Hello,’ she said, and went on past me.

‘Hello,’ I said.

Why didn’t she speak?

Alas! What boots it with uncessant care

To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade,

And strictly meditate the thankles Muse,

Were it not better don as other use

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair?

Fathers are prone to name first daughters elaborately. I don’t mind so much being named after a nymph but I really don’t care to be associated with the pastoral tradition. An idyll based on illusion has no charm for me, but then of course idylls are almost by definition illusion. Even the lovely music of Acis and Galataea does not incline me favourably towards nymphs and swains. I think a shepherd ought to tend sheep and a poet ought to write poems. If I owned sheep I don’t think I’d send them out with a poetic shepherd. Although if one forgets the shepherds of Theocritus and thinks of David herding sheep while armed with a sling that’s quite different. David, yes indeed. A poet-shepherd with a strong right arm. I wonder why I never thought of him in that light before.

My hair is often tangled and no one withes it now. There are fashions in emotion as in other things. If I were twenty now and my fiance died in a car crash I think I should soon find another man. My generation was somewhat in between things, neither free nor much supported by whatever held us in. More of us were capable of being brought to a halt by something of that sort than young people now would be. Our songs were different, our dances and our choices. Rubbish. Even in the privacy of my own mind I can’t be entirely honest with myself.

The man from the bookshop, when I saw him at the Zoo I thought he was going to say something to me. I had the feeling that he was coming from the Aquarium, that he had turtles on his mind. All he said was ‘Hello,’ and we went our separate ways. It’s curious how the mind works. I see the world through turtle-coloured glasses now. Because of the turtles I expect a stranger to speak significantly, am prepared for signs and wonders, my terrors freshen, I feel a gathering-up in me as if I’m going to die soon, I await a Day of Judgement. Whose judgement? Mine, less merciful than God’s. It is not always a comfort to find a like-minded person, another fraction of being who shares one’s incompleteness. The bookshop man has many thoughts and feelings that I have, I sense that.

I went into the Aquarium but I didn’t see George Fairbairn and I was glad not to have the chance to talk further about the turtles. The Aquarium was intensely dark after the violent sunlight outside, I could scarcely see the benches down the middle of it. Young couples were black against the green-lit windows of the tanks. I sat on the bench nearest the turtles but I didn’t look directly at them. At one particular moment that part of the Aquarium was empty except for the turtles and the fish and me. Then a young man and a girl came out of the darkness and stood in front of the turtles. He murmured something that I couldn’t quite make out, and she said in a voice that was like a clear mirror, ‘No, it’s too late, it’s too late.’

I was surprised at the effect of her words on me. I didn’t burst into tears. I didn’t know what she was referring to — it might have been love or theatre tickets but it struck me at once that her observation was probably accurate. Very likely it was too late for whatever they were talking about. She sounded the sort of girl who sees things clearly, and young as she was there was something for which it was too late.

Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. It’s a relation of self to the moment. Too-lateness is potentially every moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it’s no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are too early for most things, and most of life has to go by before it’s time for almost anything and too late for almost nothing. Nothing to lose, the present moment to gain, the integration with long-delayed Now. Headlights staring out on sleeping streets. Sea-smelling turtles and the smell of wet hessian from the sacking. The tide in or out drawn by a moon seen or unseen.

The man from the bookshop, would he be willing to drive the van? I think he’s perhaps already thought of it, without me of course. Possibly it isn’t something he’d like to share with anyone, I might be intruding. But the turtles are after all public, so to speak. Perhaps they no longer want the ocean and I’m wrong to impose my feelings on them. But I believe they do want the ocean, that must be in them. No, it’s not always a comfort to find a like-minded person. If the bookshop man and I both have designs on the turtles we have got to muddle through it as decently as possible but there’s little to be said between us beyond that. We’ve too much in common for us to be comfortable in each other’s presence for very long.

They won’t stop killing the whales. They make dog- and cat-food out of them, face creams, lipstick. They kill the whales to feed the dogs so the dogs can shit on the pavement and the people can walk in it. A kind of natural cycle. Whales can navigate, echo-locate, sing, talk to one another but they can’t get away from the harpoon guns. The International Whaling Commission is meeting here in London right now but they won’t stop the killing of whales.

The drinking fountain on the common is gone. It was there for years and years, probably ever since the footpaths and the playground and the paddling pool and the football pitch were made. The people next door have been here for twenty years and it was there when they moved in. Vandals pushed it over the other night, broke the pipes. Now it’s been taken away. There’s a little square hole full of water with a Coca-Cola tin in it and that’s all.

There’s something about the common at night, something about the dark open space facing the lighted houses that provokes savagery and terrorism. Youths on the common at night yell horribly as they pass the houses. They feel themselves to be part of the night outside and they want the people inside to be afraid. They get into the playground and scream and shout and hurl the swings about with a savage clashing of the chains as if they could destroy the world by pulling down the playground. In the morning the chains are all wound round the crossbar and the maintenance man has to come with a ladder to disentangle the swings.

The drinking fountain and the whales are all part of the same thing in my mind. I feel as if the life is being torn out of the world.

Fear. Some days I have to go to the loo three times before I leave the house in the morning. I can feel the fear thrilling in me the same way the rails feel the trains coming. Fear of everything. I wasn’t sorry to give Dora the car when we parted, I hated to drive it, always felt as if something dreadful might happen at any moment. I never felt as manly and powerful as other male drivers. When I stopped at traffic lights I never pulled up nose to nose with other cars, always stopped a little way back so as not to challenge anyone. If I take the turtles to Brighton I’ll have to drive the van but that’ll be all right. The turtles are depending on me. Something’s depending on me.

I was looking at a book on shamanism at the shop, by Mircea Eliade. In Siberia and South America, wherever they have shamans, they’re always the unstable, the epileptics, the weird ones of the group, people prone to terrors and depression as I am. But unlike me they get initiated into power and a place of importance, they become seers and healers. There’s something between them and animals, a bond, a connection, channels of power. Speech with animals, magical transformations. Could I be a turtle? Could I through an act of ecstasy swim unafraid and never lost, finding, finding? Swimming with Pangaea printed on my brain and bones, the ancient continent that was before the land masses drifted apart. That’s part of it too: there were no seas between, the land was one, there was one thing, unbroken. Now there are thousands of miles of open water and the strong ones, the swimmers, the unlost, are driven to trace the paths between, maintain the ancient connection. I don’t know whether I can keep going. A turtle doesn’t have to decide every morning whether to keep on bothering, it just carries on. Maybe that’s why man kills everything: envy.