“And have you had many pupils?”
“I’ve had four, and failed with all four.”
“Oh. Why did you fail?”
He closed his eyes to think for a moment. “I failed because I underestimated the difficulty of what I was trying to teach—and because I didn’t understand the minds of my pupils well enough.”
“I see,” I said. “And what do you teach?”
Ishmael selected a fresh branch from a pile at his right, examined it briefly, then began to nibble at it, gazing languidly into my eyes. At last he said, “On the basis of my history, what subject would you say I was best qualified to teach?”
I blinked and told him I didn’t know.
“Of course you do. My subject is: captivity.”“Captivity.”
“That’s correct.”
I sat there for a minute, then I said, “I’m trying to figure out what this has to do with saving the world.”
Ishmael thought for a moment. “Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?”
“Which want to destroy it? As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world.”
“And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world.”
“Yes, that’s so.”
“Why don’t you stop?”
I shrugged. “Frankly, we don’t know how.”
“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”
“Yes, that’s the way it seems.”
“So. You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That’s what’s at stake, isn’t it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.”
“Yes, that’s so. I’ve just never thought of it that way.”
“And you yourself are a captive in a personal way, are you not?”
“How so?”
Ishmael smiled, revealing a great mass of ivory-colored teeth. I hadn’t known he could, until then.
I said: “I have an impression of being a captive, but I can’t explain why I have this impression.”
“A few years ago—you must have been a child at the time, so you may not remember it—many young people of this country had the same impression. They made an ingenuous and disorganized effort to escape from captivity but ultimately failed, because they were unable to find the bars of the cage. If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.”
“Yes, that’s the sense I have of it.”
Ishmael nodded.
“But again, how does this relate to saving the world?”
“The world is not going to survive for very much longer as humanity’s captive. Does that need explication?”
“No. At least not to me.”