3359. “a service of love”
Having lost a dearly loved sister, a grief-stricken brother also loses any scruple that would impede his exertions to cherish her memory:
Once in Westmoreland I saw a case resembling it. I saw a ewe suddenly put off and abjure her own nature, in a service of love—yes, slough it as completely as ever serpent sloughed his skin. Her lamb had fallen into a deep trench, from which all escape was hopeless without the aid of man. And to a man she advanced, bleating clamorously, until he followed her and rescued her beloved. (De Quincey, “Affliction of Childhood,” Autobiographical Sketches)
In the first mourning period after the worst nights, servants of love appear before your wondering eyes in parades of dark distress, licensed to come and go in costume as foreign and lavish as a species custom had heretofore deemed dumb, suddenly invested with the powers of speech. You wake in the morning to glimpse the receding shapes of their Mysterious Menagerie, a disbanding Solemnity, whose pomp and circumstance shatter into fragments and figments as soon as you see them, like so much broken Glass that no man, this side of the keeper of the key to all mythology, has the power to put together again.
It’s a good thing you don’t have to take on this impossible dream. But if the mother of the lamb approaches to importune you to help rescue her child from certain death, do not allow the strangeness of the situation to delay the action of your mercy.
Note: “Philosophy is really there to redeem what lies in an animal’s gaze” (Adorno).