A conversation about lizards

Is it hope, or foolishness?

Image from IMV SkyAnimals on YouTube.

I’m currently reading a rather thick and unwieldy novel The Adventures of Augie March by Chicago author Saul Bellow. In a recent scene, Augie, the narrator, and his current love Thea are in Mexico trying to train an eagle to hunt lizards. Yet they reach in interesting point of tension about the necessity of destruction by those talons, set in some context of tension about what they are doing there: is there relationship one that can last?, and in a greater geopolitical tension of some far away war, involving “spectators from the millions… famine-marks, louse-vehicles, the supply of wars, the living fringe of a great number sunk in the ground… .” Augie feels a connection to their lizard pray: “I wished we could leave them alone,” but Thea argues back against his sympathies. In my version, we pick up on page 402: 

“She said, ‘Oh, you screwball! You get human affection mixed up in everything… Keep your silly feelings to yourself. Those lizards don’t want them, and if they felt the way you do they wouldn’t be lizards – they’d be too slow, and pretty soon they’d be extinct. And look, if you were lying dead the little lizard would run down your own mouth to catch beetles, as if you were a log…’

“This conversation about lizards was one of several on the same general topic, and gradually Thea made me see what she was driving at with me. You couldn’t get the admission out of me that a situation couldn’t be helped and was inescapably bad, but I was eternally looking for a way out, and what was up for question was whether I was a man of hope or foolishness. But I suppose I felt the good I had must be connected with a law. While she, I guess, didn’t care for my statue-yard of hopes. It seemed when somebody held me up an evil there had to be a remedy or I pulled my head and glance, turned them in another direction. She had me dead to rights when she accused me of that; and she tried to teach me her view. 

“Nevertheless I hated to see the little lizards hit and squirt blood…”

Possibly for the worse, (but maybe for the better?) I think I tend with Augie here.