A LIVING BODY is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particular and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement - and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy.

A philosopher, which is what I am supposed to be, is a sort of intellectual yokel who gapes and stares at what sensible people take for granted, a person who cannot get rid of the feeling that the barest facts of everyday life are unbelievably odd. As Aristotle put it, the beginning of philosophy is wonder. I am simply amazed to find myself living on a ball of rock that swings around an immense spherical fire. I am more amazed that I am a maze - a complex wiggliness, an arabesque of tubes, filaments, cells, fibers, and filmsthat are various kinds of palpitation in this stream of liquid energy. But what really gets me is that almost all the substance of this maze, aside from water, was once otherliving bodies - the bodies of animals and plants - and that I had to obtain it by murder. We are other creatures rearranged, for biological existence continues only through the mutual slaughter and ingestion of its various species. I exist soley through membership in this perfectly weird arrangement of beings that flourish by chewing each other up.

Obviously, being chewed up is painful, and I myself do not want to be chewed up. Thus the whole scheme bothers my conscience. If the morticians don't get me first, will my being eaten up by germs and worms be fair compensation for the countless cows, sheep, birds, and fish that I have consumed during my lifetime? I wonder: is this entire biological arrangement of mutual mayhem an insane and diabolical contraption that moves faster and faster to a dead end? I have seen plants infested with greenfly, one day swarming with plump and succulent little bodies, the next - grey dust on dry stalks. Life seems to be a system that eats itself to death, and in which victory equals defeat...