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THE STRESS OF STORMS THE LAZY PIGEON |
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THE STRESS OF STORMS THE LAZY PIGEON |
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IMMANUEL KANT
(1724-1804)
German philosopher born on April 22nd, 1724, in the Prussian city of Königsberg, which had about fifty thousand inhabitants and was the only place the philosopher ever knew. He was celebrated as the most rigid and methodical of all who had trodden upon this earth. Due to his chronometrical routines he was called “Königsberg’s Clock” as he was a man who made a sacrament out of habits. One only had to see him on any specific spot of the town to know the exact time. Of his universally known works we can name the following: Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgment, and Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch and Metaphysical Ideas. Immanuel Kant died on February 12th, 1804, in the city that always sheltered him; in the house he knew all his life, in the same cosy bed where he slept for more than twenty-nine thousand nights.
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THE LAZY PIGEON
The old thinker had been having sleepless nights. For the first time in his life, an awkward event had troubled his trained mind and stopped him from clearly observing the old Löbenicht tower. Where day by day, year by year, decade by decade he set his systematic gaze on during the afternoons.
The morning called out for the salty breeze from the Baltic Sea, and the Königsberg’s skies were slashed by the angry wings of a pigeon that followed a shortcut through the Pregolia River. She headed towards the town’s church were another colony of her friends lived.
The bird descended rapidly over the temple’s arcs. All the others rested there in peace. She cried: “He has ordered to kill them and they will be destroyed today before dusk!” She repeated this over and over as is if she were mad. This caused loud flocks of birds to rise from the park and soon hundreds of them where filling the high chambers with their curiosity.
“Calm down, Dovela! And stop that frantic fluttering or you’ll loose all your feathers,” begged the Prussian woodpigeon. “Come on, tell us. Who has ordered to kill who?”
“The old skinny little man, the one I have told you about before.”
“The philosopher?” interrupted a Castilian foreigner.
“Yes! Immanuel Kant is the name of that cruel man… and the victims are the young couple that keeps my house,” said Dovela whose head trembled in spite of herself.
“Calm down, my friend,” asked the elegant toy pigeon politely.
“Calm down?! That’s easy to say! Sure, it’s not the Königsberg Church or the wretched Löbenicht Tower that are going to fall. You are still going to sleep safe inside your fortified nests. But, what is going to happen to us, wild pigeons?”
“It must be a mistake,” said the Prussian woodpigeon. “That man is harmless.
We always, at the same exact time, see him wander around here during the afternoons: so lonely, so pensive and self-absorbed.”
“Yes,” said the stock dove. “Forty generations of pigeons have seen this man, and I can bet my beak that there has not been an inhabitant of this world who has maintained in his life a greater harmony between the sternness of thought and the purity and monotony of habits.”
“What can be interesting in a mechanistic way of life?” asked Dovela. “A life unable to move outside the cold rails of habits? Not even the news of the French Revolution, which turned everybody’s life around in this town, made him change the smallest of his routines. For me,” she cried as her breast swelled up, “the impeccable habits of that skinny, dried up old man are annoying, and his never-ending knowledge is the cause of his ongoing and sickening bachelorhood. It was probably envy that drove him to destroy my loving, helpful couple.”
“But Dovela,” insisted the Prussian, “in what way can such a wise man overlook, not even because of envy, the obvious harmony that the nice couple provides to all of us?”
“That is true,” interrupted the stock dove. “We have heard him recite this poem several times to his students:
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of art.
Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Don’t be naďve, little dove,” uttered Dovela. “The old man might fill up his books with an intentionally twisted and strange prose, but you will never find a single poetry verse in them. That one which you have learned is from an English man: Alexander Pope.”
“Since when has this country bumpkin become so educated?” said the crested one as the feathers in her head lifted up.
“Listen, you snob,” screeched Dovela, “I live in front of his window, I’ve seen the book on the bed rest and that hypocrite reads it almost every night. Jesus!” she sighed. “If only his so well thought pure reason, his so clean practical reason and his maze-like judgment would make him understand the existence of the fragile chain that binds us all to nature, my friends and I wouldn’t be in danger. But I know that old fool and I know that he will paralyze his already rigid days on the critique and on the metaphysical ideas,” she concluded in a tone of defeat.
“Dovela is right,” said the messenger pigeon. “The thing is Kant is far from understanding our nature: he only says stupid things about us and he calls those follies ‘The paradox of the lazy pigeon’. Listen to it! It turns out—says he—that once one of us was tired of the hard flapping of its wings; so when the it realized the existence of air it sadly started thinking that it would fly much better if there were no air. Have you ever heard something so preposterous? I think that not even the pigeon of a pouter who is the dumbest of us all would have thought of something so silly.
” After listening to the messenger pigeon, the others started a great fuss inside the archways and even the walls of Köningsberg Cathedral felt some dislike towards Kant.
To drive away the tumult the priest rang the bells of the temple a few minutes earlier before the evening mass. This confused the time of all the villagers except Kant. On the first ring the birds flew away in a flock towards the philosopher’s house.
However, they got there too late: the axe had already hacked down the young couple of poplars that had grown boldly on a neighbour’s yard and had reached as high as the window of Immanuel Kant’s house. They blocked his usual view of the Löbenicht Tower and this threatened the integrity of his habits.
Since then, the pigeons comment with one another “The paradox of the poplars”, because out of their hard wood a many benches were built to decorate the avenue that ran from Kant’s house to the Cathedral’s park: a usual wandering place for the senile thinker. They are benches were Mr. Kant loses his precious time due to the many stops that now he is forced to make along his ordinary route. Stops disturbed by the rain of foul, white, watery pigeon dung that the angry birds drop on his path.
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© Alberto Sibaja Álvarez. San José, Costa Rica
® The Stress of Storms
