J and I have been chatting about essays and essayists lately, so I re-read Consider the Lobster. All the questions and the moral quandary about the methods used to cook a lobster remain unresolved. And just in that lies the timelessness of the piece. That and also the tone and voice the writer takes - he is confused and wants to understand if his readers and the world at large share in his confusion. That sentiment is also timeless. The lines that resonated most with me in my first reading of this essay many years ago are still the ones that get to the core of the issue for me
..Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remains the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering. The logic of this (preference —> suffering) relation may be easiest to see in the negative case. If you cut certain kinds of worms in half, the halves will often keep crawling around and going about their vermiform business as if nothing had happened. When we assert, based on their post-op behavior, that these worms appear not to be suffering, what we’re really saying is that there’s no sign the worms know anything bad has happened or would prefer not to have gotten cut in half. Lobsters, though, are known to exhibit preferences..
The idea that for pain to exist and be acknowledged it must be accompanied by the ability to demonstrate understanding of being in pain and communicate it in a way that can be understood by others, is a concept that transcends lobsters. As a reader, that is how I had read and still read this piece.
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