Julian Barnes, 'A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters', 1989:
“...Even before the waters rose there had been grounds for
unease. I know your species tends to look down on our world, considering it
brutal, cannibalistic and deceitful (though you might acknowledge the argument
that this makes us closer to you rather than more distant). But among us there
had always been, from the beginning, a sense of equality. Oh, to be sure, we
ate one another, and so on; the weaker species knew all too well what to expect
if they crossed the path of something that was both bigger and hungry. But we
merely recognized this as being the way of things. The fact that one animal was
capable of killing another did not make the first animal superior to the
second; merely more dangerous. Perhaps this is a concept difficult for you to
grasp, but there was a mutual respect amongst us. Eating another animal was not
grounds for despising it; and being eaten did not instill in the victim – or
the victim’s family – any exaggerated admiration for the dining species.
Noah – or Noah’s God – changed all that. If you had a Fall,
so did we. But we were pushed. It was when the selections were being made for
the Compound of the Chosen that we first noticed it. All this stuff about two
of everything was true (and you could see it made a certain basic sense); but
it wasn’t the end of the matter. In the Compound we began to notice that some
species had been whittled down not to a couple but to seven (again, this obsession
with sevens). At first we thought the extra five might be travelling reserves
in case the original pair fell sick. But then it slowly began to emerge. Noah –
or Noah’s God – had decreed that there were two classes of beast: the clean and
the unclean. Clean animals got into the Ark by sevens; the unclean by twos...”
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