The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq, Gavin Bowd Page A

a selective advantage that might result for the whole of the group from it have been the object of imprecise, multiple, and contradictory calculations, which finally sank into confusion and oblivion.
     
     
    Goodness, compassion, fidelity, and altruism therefore remain for us impenetrable mysteries, contained, however, within the limited space of the corporeal exterior of a dog. It is on the solution to this problem that the coming, or not, of the Future Ones depends.
     
     
    I believe in the coming of the Future Ones.

 
     
    Daniel1, 7
     
    Play entertains.
    —Patricia Dürst-Benning
     
    NOT ONLY ARE DOGS CAPABLE of love, but the sex drive does not seem to pose them any insurmountable problems: when they meet a female in heat, she is ready for penetration; when the contrary is true, they seem to feel neither desire nor a lack of it.
    Not only are dogs in themselves a subject of permanent wonderment, but they constitute for humans an excellent
subject of conversation
—international, democratic, and consensual. It is thus that I met Harry, a German ex-astrophysicist, accompanied by Truman, his beagle. A peaceful naturist, around sixty years old, Harry devoted his retirement to the observation of the stars—the sky of the region was, he explained to me, exceptionally unpolluted; in the daytime he did some gardening, and a little tidying up. He lived alone with his wife, Hildegarde—and, naturally, Truman: they hadn’t had children. It is glaringly obvious that without dogs I would have had nothing to say to this man—even with a dog, as it was, the conversation dragged a little (he invited us to dinner the following Saturday; he lived five hundred meters away, he was our closest neighbor). Fortunately he didn’t speak French, any more than I spoke German; the fact of having overcome the
language barrier
(a few phrases in English, a smattering of Spanish) gave us therefore, in the end, the sensation of a
successful evening,
when in fact we had only, for two hours, shouted banalities (he was pretty deaf). After the meal, he asked me if I wanted to observe the rings of Saturn. Of course, of course, I wanted to. Well, it was indeed a wonderful spectacle, of natural or divine origin—who knows?—offered for contemplation by man: what more could be said? Hildegarde played the harp, I guess she played it
marvelously,
but frankly I don’t know if it’s possible to play the harp badly—I mean that the way it’s constructed, the instrument has always seemed to me incapable of making anything other than melodious sounds. Two things, I think, stopped me from getting angry: for one thing, Isabelle was wise enough to pretend to be tired, and to want to return home early, at least once I’d finished the bottle of kirsch; for another, I had noticed in the Germans’ house a complete, bound edition of the works of Teilhard de Chardin. If there is one thing that has always plunged me into sadness or compassion, I mean into a state that excludes all manner of nastiness or irony, it is the existence of Teilhard de Chardin—not only his existence, but the very fact that he has, or could have had, readers, however small the number. In the presence of a reader of Teilhard de Chardin I feel disarmed, nonplussed, ready to break down in tears. At the age of fifteen I had fallen by chance on
The Divine Milieu,
left by a presumably disgusted reader on a bench at the railway station in Étréchy-Chamarande. In the space of a few pages, the book had torn screams from me; out of despair, I had smashed my bicycle pump against the walls of the cellar. Teilhard de Chardin was, of course, what one properly calls a
first-class fanatic;
this didn’t make him any less totally depressing. He resembled a little those German Christian Scientists, described by Schopenhauer in his time, who, “once they have put down retort or scalpel, start philosophizing on concepts they received at their first communion.” There was also within him this