It’s going up for midnight now on a wet Friday night and the house is quiet. In fact I have the house to myself, and I’m enjoying it. My wife has moved out. Again. And both my kids are away enjoying whatever passes for the night life these days. They won’t be back until late. I can wear my waistcoat and pocket-watch without incurring their mirthful banter. Hurray! So I’m a Victorian gent born a hundred years too late. Get over it.
I hasten to add my good lady has not gone permanently, at least I hope not, rather she is sleeping at her parents’ house not far away, and will be back tomorrow. The reason: she has a phobia of mice and refuses to sleep anywhere inhabited by even the thought of a mouse.
We’ve had a few this year, which is unusual. I’ve read it’s a climate-change thing, that mice are going hungry, or becoming more multitudinous, or at any rate more inclined to pop indoors than they once were. I was watching TV when I saw it, a fast moving blur in the corner of my eye. Being myopic I’m plagued by floaters anyway and wondered if it was one of those, hoped it was, but it wasn’t. The mouse put in another appearance shortly afterwards, slower this time, even pausing to have a look at me. Then it vanished behind a cabinet.
It was a work night and I didn’t want to be disturbed by mice, real or imagined, dancing the hokey-cokey around my bed. So I fetched all the traps out of the garage, where they have mouldered since the summer, and the last mouse incident. Eight traps, baited and set. I used the special mouse gunk they sell in B+Q. Overkill, perhaps, but by morning the mouse was dead.
On the one hand this was a positive result, but on the other, since I like mice, in the wild at least, it was not the ideal result. They are after all rather fascinating and evolutionary successful creatures, to say nothing of being quite cute. My actions therefore seemed somewhat utilitarian, hurried and precipitous, and I drove to work that morning in a rather thoughtful frame of mind, after dumping the mouse unceremoniously in the bin.
The mouse died because it had inconvenienced me, and I’m apt to ruminate upon the broader philosophical implications of such things. I was reminded of a scene from the otherwise dreadful movie: “The Next Karate Kid” where a delightfully young Hillary Swank is about to squish a cockroach at the dinner table in a monastery. The bug is swept to safety by one of the monks, and poor Hillary earns Mr Miyagi’s approbation, also a lecture on how the killing of anything sets up a chain of suffering, and that we should respect all life.
Apart from the performances of Hillary Swank and Pat Morita as Miyagi, this was rather a weak outing for the “Karate-Kid” genre. A lot of the philosophising was by this time sounding as if it came from self help books, without sitting on much by way of intellectual or philosophical bedrock. But it got me thinking about this business of killing.
Should Hillary have let the bug crawl all over her food? Okay, she could have picked it off the table before it got to her bowl, set it safely down outside, so I suppose Mr Miyagi had a point. There was no need to kill the bug. Within the monastery, there is no killing, he tells us. All life is respected, but that’s rather an insular and somewhat simplified view of reality.
“You mean you’ve never killed a cockroach, Mr Miyagi?”
“Miyagi don’t live in Monastery, Julie San, but still respect all living things.”
Woa, wait a minute! Has Miyagi ever killed a cockroach? Answer the damned question, man! Hmm, you ask me, I think he fluffed his answer. I don’t think he treated Julie (Hillary) with the necessary intellectual respect there. He did not solve the central paradox at all. To kill or not to kill.
Cockroaches aren’t the sort of creatures you want skittering around your kitchen. Similarly, mice aren’t conducive to human health and well being. At the bigger end of the scale man-eating tigers develop a taste for humans and thereby cause no end of suffering for their victims and their victims’ loved ones. So,… is there there no point at which killing becomes necessary, or in any way even spiritually acceptable? Or should we always be prepared to sacrifice our own lives, our own health, our own well being, rather than take the life of the simplest of creatures?
If we give the problem a little thought we can say well, maybe it’s acceptable to take life only if it’s unavoidable. But to what lengths should we go to avoid taking it? It’ll be Daddy Long-Leg season soon, and my good lady has a phobia for those as well, but they’re fairly easy to catch and put outside – hint, go for the wings rather than the legs because Daddy Long Legs are perfectly happy to shed a leg and leave you holding it. But really, is this not mere sentimentality? Are we to show the same respectful awe to the Daddy-long-leg, or the mouse that we do to the man-eating tiger, or the great white shark? I admit I’m prone to such thinking, and I do regret killing that mouse, but is it reasonable of me to do so? In relative peace-time when there is room to manoeuvre, I suppose it is, but in a fight for survival, the mouse or any other enemy can be dispatched without a second thought, especially if we can persuade ourselves they deserve the label: Evil.
But all of that was a few days ago, the house is free of mice now and I’m confident the good lady Graeme will return to sleep, eventually. I would much rather the mouse had found it’s way out of my house. I do respect all life, really, and to the mouse, I apologise, but like Mr Miyagi, I fluff the answer to the paradox.
I shall leave the last word to Mister Miyagi: “It’s okay to lose to your opponent. It’s never okay to lose to fear.”
No, actually my favourite quote is: “Never trust a spiritual leader who cannot dance.”
The Rivendale Review 