Humans Are Animals — Yet Crucially We Are Something More | T.C. Boyle | Big Think

Humans Are Animals — Yet Crucially We Are Something More

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What do we learn about ourselves when we look at nature? We recognize deep similarities in our behavior and that of (other) animals. Intellectually, this is obvious to anyone who has sat through a high school biology class and learned about Darwin's evolution, but only recently so.

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T.C. BOYLE :

T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of 26 books of fiction, including, most recently, After the Plague (2001), Drop City (2003), The Inner Circle (2004), Tooth and Claw (2005), The Human Fly (2005), Talk Talk (2006), The Women (2009), Wild Child (2010), When the Killing's Done (2011), San Miguel (2012), T.C. Boyle Stories II (2013), The Harder They Come (2015) and The Terranauts (2016).

He received a Ph.D. degree in 19th-Century British Literature from the University of Iowa in 1977, his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1974, and his B.A. in English and History from SUNY Potsdam in 1968. He has been a member of the English Department at the University of Southern California since 1978, where he is Distinguished Professor of English. His work has been translated into more than two dozen foreign languages, including German, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Farsi, Croatian, Turkish, Albanian, Vietnamese, Serbian and Slovene. His stories have appeared in most of the major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, The Paris Review, GQ, Antaeus, Granta and McSweeney's, and he has been the recipient of a number of literary awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Prise for best novel of the year (World's End, 1988); the PEN/Malamud Prize in the short story (T.C. Boyle Stories, 1999); and the Prix Médicis Étranger for best foreign novel in France (The Tortilla Curtain, 1997). He currently lives near Santa Barbara with his wife and three children.

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TRANSCRIPT:

T.C. Boyle:  There is no hope whatsoever. Our species will be extinguished probably in a couple of generations, maybe even before that depending upon the microbes of the world. And of course the potential for nuclear war, not to mention, as in my short story Chichaloob, when that comment comes back again. So we're all doomed; everything sucks; I have no good news for anybody. Other authors want to make their audience feel good, I want everybody to feel really bad. Just joking. I'm writing about environments. It obsesses me. Our place as a species on this planet we are animals and yet we're something else too. How did those two elements of us intersect and what does it mean for this environment?

People say save the earth. Well, the earth as far as we know will be here for another three and a half billion years until, of course, the sun becomes a yellow giant and burns us to a sender like a charcoal briquette. But really what the environmentalists are saying is let's save the planet under the conditions that allowed our species to arise. Well, of course, we're not doing this. In 2000 I wrote A Friend of the Earth about global warming. Well here we are. I wish I had better news. What sustains me mentally? Although after this interview people may question whether I have been sustained mentally, is nature and my art. When I'm doing my art I am revolving these questions in my mind I don't begin with a political point I just let it flow and see what it is. And secondly, being in nature. I'm in nature a lot. Within a week ago I was in the high Sierras every day by myself sitting by a creek deep in the woods just meditating good on things like the joy of being an animal in nature, of smelling the breeze, of listening to the water, of seeing the various critters that are coming by. There is a lot of wildlife in the Sierra Nevada. I go out every day and I see things like ants and biting flies.

One of the problems with a novel trying to take the facts of real life and meditate on them and make it fiction is that because of the Internet we have instant access to everything all the time and all information so a lot of the bizarre news stories that I would meditate on and write about, particularly for short stories in the beginning of my career were known only to me. They were my stories. Now everybody knows these stories immediately and they're all writing their things about it. So it's diffic...

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