sadistic fun it was having with its mind games, and the cruel hunting
games of cats and their dead mice. Deeper into its eyes he saw a
starving child and a vulture awaiting on a rock, the fight for dominion
of species and nations, and the sexual aggression of making love among
mankind. He felt like walking meat; and he knew that all animals felt
the same of their own lives ceaselessly. He grieved for them. The
mosquito knew this intuitively and began to laugh at him for his
sensitivity and his naïve animistic thinking, which like a child, made
animals conscious and sagacious.
"You aren't real, you know, but the fever of my own brain," said
Jatupon to curtail his vision.
"Oh, let's not start the reality game. I'll make this simple so
that even you can understand it. It foils others I enlighten who give
me the same argument. I say to them that they, who create ideas, will
die in a hundred years but an idea that they might have has the
possibility of living on. To the idea, I say, the man would not seem
real." Then he obfuscated. "Didn't you read in an encyclopedia one
time that the American president, Abraham Lincoln, said, 'In the civil
war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from
the purpose of either party--and yet the human instrumentalities,
working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his
purpose.'"
"I don't understand what you are meaning by that. I didn't
understand that long sentence when I read it anyhow."
"You don't understand subtle and abstract meanings because you are
uneducated. You sometimes dabble here and there with an encyclopedia
in the library and then you forget everything you've read when you
understand it at all," said the mosquito in a contumelious air. "Only
the dreamer is the illusion. Not the dream. The dreamer sinks back
with the dirt."