Goldfish and Morals
Thompson, Frederic
July 17, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 295 GOLD FISH AND MORALS By FREDERIC THOMPSON THOUGH not to be compared with the adventures of the well-known scientist who spent hours under tropic seas on...
...A dash...
...He, or she, was heavy with beauty, an easy prey for the less aesthetic...
...One seems tragic...
...The second is half fantailed, with a face and bulbous eyes like a Pomeranian, his fleur-de-lys tail trimmed with black, and the rest of his body gold...
...The third is a fantail with a short body almost red, black eyes, and a trailing white tail like the plumage of a bird of paradise...
...There is also a short coral tree, through the branches of which the fish seem to like to dart and to browse...
...At the same time he hopes, and not without precedent, that the Almighty from His eminence will disturb with His hand some of the seemingly natural pursuits of those who are governed by their innate natures, or by so-called laws of nature, and nothing more...
...Ours is on a window-sill where the light shining through makes every act of the occupants as unprivate as life in the world must be to God and to the saints and the angels in heaven...
...Startle...
...There are three fish in it...
...How different, the moralist might observe—and not irreverently—is, say, life dictated by an intelligence inspired by God: a convent of contemplative sisters, for instance, respected and supported by the restless ones of the world...
...and the other, a Japanese snail with a light tortoise-shell conch and a coral body and a mouth, you might say, in the sole of his foot, never-endingly eating wherever he goes...
...Then surely one of the restless ones would come upon her...
...Rapid flight...
...In the bowl the restless ones prey on each other's tails in an endless circle...
...Maybe she speculated on the effects on her destinies of the will of the odd mammoths outside her bowl...
...July 17, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 295 GOLD FISH AND MORALS By FREDERIC THOMPSON THOUGH not to be compared with the adventures of the well-known scientist who spent hours under tropic seas on terms of intimacy with strange sub-aqueous things, contemplation of the life in a goldfish bowl has many interests...
...Round and round they go, first one taking a nip at the other, then the other speeding up until finally he takes a nip at the fugitive and animated gold before him...
...Peace destroyed...
...They grow from brain-stone corals picked up one day when in a flying boat I stopped out of the sky on a little deserted atoll off the coast of Haiti, for a dive into the indigo Caribbean to escape for a moment the burning sun in the indigo air...
...Covering everything in the bowl is a fine soft grass, or water moss...
...It was the case of the fantail...
...Even the rounded shell of the little fancy snail is tufted with green hairs...
...One is an ugly, codheaded fellow of a very tarnished gold splotched with black, long and thin-bodied, short-tailed and brisk...
...There are two snails: one, rather ordinary looking with a moss-green shell and a brown body and a snout like an elephant's trunk a fraction of an inch long...
...The plants are for us nameless and look like the first spiny trees that might have covered the edge of the land when the world was in the making, before the great reptiles had crawled out of the slime...
...Anyhow, she would seek to relax on a bed of moss in the shade of the coral tree or of one of the vegetable trees, or perhaps perch in mid-bowl upon a branch...
...The crystal globe stocked with plants and snails and fish, is a miniature of the world as it is represented to have been before man...
...We have had to intervene...
...The calm one, her calm shattered, was minus some of her gold which had gone down the maw of the restless one...
...Maybe she dreamt of love and life in a swift-moving stream far from the fifth floor window-sill of a New York apartment...
...For a while she might be left in peace, unnoticed, undemanded and undemanding...
...He (say it was a he) would look upon her not unselfishly, but for profit...
...Then the moralist suddenly envisages wrecked abbeys and convents, the former occupants scattered, the lands and possessions stolen by some of the restless ones more brooklessly restless than the others...
...It may even be profitable and offer illustrations of familiar truths in danger of the contempt of being forgotten...
...She (let us decide this matter once and for all and without question call the subject, she) she could not swim as fast as the others, and as a matter of fact seemed inclined toward a quiet life, perhaps being of a contemplative disposition, who knows how poetical...
...This was repeated not once, nor occasionally, but as habit grew into usage and the taste of the restless ones for gold increased, it became a weary, 296 THE COMMONWEAL July 17, 1929 weary persecution and the strength of the persecuted, never great, seemed to be waning...
...Staring mournfully into the bowl and contemplating that evolution and natural selection are empty terms except in application to the differences of forms and appearances, he dips in and saves the gentle goldfish from the ungentle—an annoying, no doubt, and unpredictable interference to the latter in the pursuit of their self-enrichment...
...In this arena, the animal destinies from day to day are absorbingly interesting to watch...
...There is balance in this, and though it is unrestful for a person looking into the globe for a few moments' forgetfulness of the world, there is a comic natural justice in it that calls for no intervention beyond the ken of the inmates of the microcosm...
...He, or she, ("Sir, or Madame, truly . . . ") was having that beautiful tail eaten to shreds by the others...
Vol. 10 • July 1929 • No. 11
