Much between the Oink and Curly Tail

A character in PBS's Call the Midwife remarked that dogs look up to us, cats look down at us, but pigs see us as we are.  That bit of wit may say more about our relationships with dogs and cats than it does about pigs.  Nevertheless, pigs probably deserve more credit than they usually get.  Just to start with, we virtually never hold up any quality of a pig for people to emulate.  We say humans should be faithful, and recognize dogs as being so.  In contrast, to call a person a "pig" or a "hog" is always an insult.

detail from
Gauguin's The Black Pigs

Despite that contrast between our attitudes about dogs and pigs, there may well have been a similarity between the way ancient ancestors of dogs and of pigs entered the circle of human culture.  Our domesticated pigs are descendants of tusked wild boars.  Scavenging in humans' waste heaps, those boars that were less aggressive would have been more likely to have been domesticated (just as dogs were from their wild ancestors).  Recent DNA studies have now revealed that the transition from wild boars to pigs was made in seven separate regions of the world, ranging from China to India to Central Europe.

The human-pig relationship, however, has been an uneven one ever since those domestications in Neolithic times.  The unevenness has extended far beyond the matter of pork-eating being a taboo in parts of Judaism and Islam, in contrast with it being the primary source of meat in New Guinea. The larger difficulty has been in humans' not having figured out what degree of wildness and tameness they want in the lives of their hogs.  For centuries in Europe, hogs were allowed to wander freely, perhaps getting some of their own food from the forests, but also being able to search out humans' garbage.  That freedom meant that hogs sometimes caused accidents or killed children, leading to the oddity of a number of hogs having actually been put on trial during the 14th century before being executed.

Today, we have other problems resulting from an opposite condition -- a reduction in the pigs' freedom.  The over-concentration of hogs in massive factory farms has led to unnatural concentrations of urine and feces, far beyond the ability of Nature to reprocess it into the ground. And beyond our ability to find a good way of dealing with it.

pig statue in Sweden

Yes, the history of human-pig relationships has been an awkward one.  Knowing something of human nature, it should not be surprising that people have sometimes pointed the finger of blame at the pigs, even though we ourselves have been ultimately at fault.  It is not just Charlotte in E.B. White's Charlotte's Web who might feel some sympathy for the pig. Perhaps we could give pigs more credit for all they have contributed to the human race -- from pork to leather to bristle brushes to even finding highly valued truffles.  I am doubtful, however, that pigs will be given full credit.  Even when we see a sausage in a bun with mustard, we linguistically honor our canine friends by exclaiming "hot dog" -- saying "dog," when it was the pig that made the real sacrifice.

~~~

As you read this short history, did it bring any thoughts to mind?

Our Time, and Nature’s Time

Humankind, over the course of centuries, has figured out how to measure time with progressively greater precision. From ancient water clocks that marked off only hours to contemporary atomic clocks that can divide a mere second into billionths, the desire to mark off time more precisely has been part of the human story. Nevertheless, in our everyday lives, we often don't know how to handle time in a way that satisfies us perfectly. That ancient human challenge endures, despite all our Day-Timers and appointment software.

ancient sundial

In 2nd-century Rome, where public sundials became unusually widespread, the playwright Plautus complained:

"The gods confound the man who first found out

How to distinguish hours!

Who in this place set up a sun-dial,

To cut and hack my days so wretchedly

Into small portions."

I'm glad, for his sake, that Plautus is not alive today, experiencing how we cut up time into quarter-hours and, in the case of athletes, fractions of a second.

I was provided a quite different perspective on time when my wife told me about something she observed on a T.V. cooking show.  The chef showed the viewers a clam the size of my wife's fist, pointing out the rings on the shell that marked off periods of growth.  Then -- after explaining that the clam was 200 years old -- the chef opened it, pulled out the small body inside, and chopped it into a few pieces for consumption.  My wife said she felt there was something not right about it:  200 years of life gone, and in just a few gulps.  (I have imagined what a different scenario it would be if the little clam had been kept alive in an aquarium for fascinated visitors to peer in at it and be amazed.)

So what are we to make of time?  What is time itself, after all?  It is not something easily thought about in the abstract by average minds.  Even the quite intelligent St. Augustine in the 4th century said that he thought he easily knew what time was -- until he tried to say exactly what it was. Indeed, when we want to think about time, we have to either mark off time in measurements or compare ourselves to something like a mountain or a clam.  And as we do so, the sun rises and sets, and the Earth tilts back and forth on its axis, both unaffected, but encompassing our lives in regular natural cycles.

Despite all our measuring of time, despite all the synchronizations demanded by our modern urban societies, there is also a phenomenon almost every person has noticed:  Namely, that time, in fact, seems to drag at times and at other times go by so quickly.  The early 20th-century Christian writer Henry Van Dyke put it so insightfully and poetically:

"Time is

Too Slow for those who Wait,

Too Swift for those who Fear,

Too Long for those who Grieve,

Too Short for those who Rejoice;

But for those who Love

Time is not."

~~~

Does time ever challenge you?  How?

(The Plautus quote is taken from

The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin, © 1983.)
(The original form of Van Dyke's poem [the last word of which is frequently misquoted as "eternity"]
 can be read at this external link: The Works of Henry Van Dyke, Vol 1. © 1921.  p. 259)