re: With a lot of slow pokes, Diego saves the tortoise from extinction

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With a lot of slow pokes, Diego saves the tortoise from extinction
This is something
I've never told anyone before.
Something so strange, so terrible.
Forgive me if I sound quite mad,
but it's true all the same.
Sebastian saw the face of God.
I'd like to hear about that.
Yes, yes.
One long ago summer,
sitting right here in this garden...
...Sebastian said to me,
"Mother, listen to this."
And he read me
Herman Melville's description...
...of the Encantadas,
the Galpagos Islands.
He read me that description
and said we had to go there.
And so we did go there that summer...
...on a chartered boat,
a four-masted schooner...
...the sort of boat that
Melville would have sailed on.
We saw the Encantadas.
But on the Encantadas
we saw something...
...that Melville hadn't written about.
We saw the great sea turtles
crawl up out of the sea...
...for their annual egg-laying.
Once a year, the female
of the sea turtles...
...crawls up out of the equatorial sea
onto the blazing sand beach...
...of a volcanic island
to dig a pit in the sand...
...and deposit her eggs there.
It's a long and dreadful thing,
the depositing of the eggs in the pits.
And when it's finished...
...the exhausted
female turtle crawls...
...back to the sea half-dead.
She never sees her offspring.
But we did.
Sebastian knew exactly when
the sea turtle eggs would be hatched...
...and we returned in time for it.
You went back?
In time to witness
the hatching of the sea turtles...
...and their desperate flight
to the sea.
The narrow beach, the color
of caviar, was all in motion...
...but the sky was in motion too,
full of flesh-eating birds.
And the noise of the birds...
...their horrible savage cries
as they circled...
...over the narrow black beach
of the Encantadas...
...while the new-hatched sea turtles
scrambled out of their sandpits...
...and started their race to the sea.
Race to the sea?
To escape the flesh-eating birds...
...that made the sky
almost as black as the beach.
And I said, "Sebastian, no.
No, it's not like that."
But he made me look.
He made me see that terrible sight.
What was not like that?
Life.
I said, "No.
No! That's not true!"
But he said it is.
He said, "Look, Violet.
Look, there on the shore."
And I looked and saw the sand
all alive, all alive...
...as the new-hatched sea turtles
made their dash to the sea...
...while the birds hovered
and swooped to attack...
...and hovered and swooped to attack.
They were diving down
on the sea turtles...
...turning them over...
...to expose their soft undersides...
...tearing their undersides open...
...and rending and eating their flesh.
Sebastian guessed that possibly...
...only a hundredth
of 1 percent of their number...
...would escape to the sea.
Nature is not created
in the image of man's compassion.
Nature is cruel!
Sebastian knew it all along,
was born knowing it, but not I.
I said, "No, no, those are
only birds, turtles, not us."
I didn't know then it was us.
That we are all of us trapped
by this devouring creation.
I couldn't, wouldn't face
the horror of the truth...
...even that last day
in the Encantadas...
...when Sebastian left me...
...and spent the whole
blazing equatorial day...
...in the crow's-nest of the schooner,
watching that thing on the beach...
...until it was too dark to see.
And when he came down the rigging,
he said, "Well, now I've seen Him."
And he meant God.
Do you believe he saw God?
He saw the whole thing there
that day on the beach.
But I was like you. I said no.
I refused to believe...
...until suddenly, last summer,
I learned my son was right.
That what he had shown me
in the Encantadas...
...was the horrible...
...the inescapable truth.

-- Tennessee Williams, Suddenly Last Summer

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