On the zoo

"At the zoo, that terrible 'zoological garden,' the child see living animals he has never seen before- jaguars, vultures, buffalo, and, strangest of all, giraffes. He sees for the first time the confused variety of the animal kingdom, and the spectacle, far from alarming or frightening him, delights him. It delights him so much, in fact, that a trip to the zoo becomes part of the 'fun' of childhood, or what passes for fun. How is one to explain this common and yet mysterious occurence?

We can, of course deny it. We can tell ourselves that children brusquely led into that garden become, twenty years down the line, neurotic, and the truth is, there's not a child who has not discovered the zoo and not an adult who is not, when carefully examined, discovered to be a neurotic. Or we may assert that the child is, by definition, a discoverer, and that discovering the camel is no more remarkable than discovering mirrors, or water, or stairs. We may assert that the child trusts his parents, those who take him into that place filled with animals. Besides, the stuffed tiger on his bed and the tiger in the encyclopedia have prepared him to look without fear upon the tiger of the flesh and blood. Plato (should he join this discussion) would tell us that the child has already seen the tiger, in the world of archetypes, and that now, seeing it, he but recognizes it. Schopenhauer (still more startlingly) would say that the child looks without fear on tigers because he knows that he is the tigers and the tigers are he, or, more precisely, that tigers and he are of one essence- Will."

Jorge Luis Borges, excerpted from the Forward of The Book of Imaginary Beings

photo: Academy Animals, 2002, Richard Barnes

http://www.richardbarnes.net/