Opossum in the Backyard

While I was weeding in the backyard Sunday morning, an opossum appeared in one of the tall shrubs that grow along the wooden fence at the rear of our lot. Like koalas, opossums are too stuffed-animal-like for their own good. Giving humans something cute and cuddly – Easter chicks and bunnies come to mind – often amounts to a death sentence. When I was a kid in Cleveland, I remember the old German widow who lived next door cussing loudly one summer evening in her native language. We investigated, and found her slamming a opossum into a bloody pancake with the blade of a shovel.

By the merest coincidence I had been reading Spinoza’s Ethics a few hours earlier – Part IV, Proposition XXXVII, particularly Note I, which begins: “He who, guided by emotion only, endeavours to cause others to love what he loves himself, and to make the rest of the world live according to his own fancy, acts solely by impulse, and is, therefore, hateful, especially to those who take delight in something different, and accordingly study and, by similar impulse, endeavour, to make men live in accordance with what pleases themselves.”

The pertinent passage comes in the subsequent paragraph, in which Spinoza dismisses laws against slaughtering animals as “founded rather on vain superstition and womanish pity than on sound reason.” Note Spinoza’s reasoning: “…we have the same rights in respect to them [animals] as they have in respect to us. Nay, as everyone’s right is defined by his virtue, or power, men have far greater rights over beasts than beasts have over men. Still, I do not deny that beasts feel: what I deny is, that we may not consult our own advantage and use them as we please, treating them in the way which best suits us; for their nature is not like ours, and their emotions are naturally different from human emotions.”

Spinoza’s argument is admirable. He blesses neither animal abuse nor sanctification. Were a poverty-stricken neighbor to shoot Pogo, cook him and serve him to his hungry children, he would have Spinoza’s blessing – and mine. Were the same neighbor to spend his afternoon torturing the opossum – you get the idea.

I was looking into Spinoza, as I often do, because on Sunday I linked to my review of The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert. With his learned devotion to 17th-century Dutch culture, Herbert often returns to the lens grinder-philospher. In the 1970s he published “Mr Cogito Tells of the Temptation of Spinoza,” a fable about the meeting of Spinoza and the conventional deity whose existence he denied. It’s God who tempts Spinoza with the ways of the world. He curries favor like a hustler:

“—you’re a good talker Baruch
I like your geometrical Latin
and the clarity of your syntax
the symmetry of your proofs
but let us speak
of Things Truly
Great”

And nags like a yenta:

“—think of
a woman
who will give you a child”

The O. Henry-ish ending to the poem may remind you of a well-known scene from The Wizard of Oz. More powerful, though, is a brief prose piece, “Spinoza’s Bed,” that Herbert called an “apocrypha” and published in Still Life with a Bridle. In it, Herbert recounts a puzzling episode in Spinoza’s life after the death of his father in 1656. His stepsister and her husband tricked Spinoza out of his inheritance. Instead of acquiescing, he turned litigious. He sued his family in an effort to recover virtually every object from his father’s house. “Then he requested objects without any value,” Herbert writes, “explaining that he had an emotional attachment to them.” Spinoza, one of the saints of philosophy, seemed to be motivated by Trumpish greed. Instead, once he won the suit, he kept only his mother’s bed and returned the rest to his family, his recently defeated legal adversaries. Here’s Herbert’s gloss on Spinoza’s baffling actions:

“No one understood why he acted this way. It seemed an obvious extravagance, but in fact had a deeper meaning. It was as if Baruch wanted to say that virtue is not at all an asylum for the weak. The art of renunciation is an act of courage – it requires the sacrifice of things universally desired (not without hesitation and regret) for matters that are great and incomprehensible.”

Despite the noise my younger sons and the neighbor’s dog were making, the opossum remained in the shrub, 12 feet or so off the ground, for half an hour or so. Then, slowly, without grace, he climbed on a power line and passed behind our house and the nextdoor neighbor’s garage, pausing to pull down a branch with his paw and chew some leaves. I watched him waddle away, never in a hurry, then I pulled some more weeds, and the next time I looked he was gone.