The Silence of Animals On Progress and Other Modern Myths

'By nature volatile and discordant, the human animal looks to silence for relief from being itself while other creatures enjoy silence as their birthright.' In a book which is by turns chilling and beautiful, John Gray continues the thinking that made his Straw Dogs such a phenomenal success. Drawing on an extraordinary array of memoirs, poems, fiction and philosophy, Gray makes us re-imagine our place in the world. Writers as varied as Borges, Orwell, Koestler, Ballard and Conrad, he shows, are mesmerized by forms of human extremity - experiences on the outer edge of the possible, or which tip into fantasy and myth. How do our imaginations leap into worlds so far beyond our actual reality? The Silence of Animals is consistently fascinating, filled with unforgettable images and a delight in the conundrum of our existence - an existence which we decorate with countless fictions. We twist and turn to avoid acknowledging that we too are animals, separated from the others perhaps only by our self-conceit and our insistence that human life has a meaning that their lives lack. In modern times, we have created this meaning through the myth of progress-the faith that, alone among our fellow-creatures, we are ascending to a higher form of life. In the Babel we have created for ourselves, it is the silence of animals that both reproaches and bewitches us.