Collected Fables by James Thurber

Author:James Thurber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

“The missing link is not lost,” said the dinosaur sorrowfully. “It’s hiding.”

Man paid the doomed dinosaur no mind. “If there were no Man it would be necessary to create one,” said Man, “for God moves in mysterious, but inefficient, ways, and He needs help. Man will go on forever, but you will be one with the mammoth and the mastodon, for monstrosity is the behemother of extinction.”

“There are worse things than being extinct,” said the dinosaur sourly, “and one of them is being you.”

Man strutted a little pace and flexed his muscles. “You cannot even commit murder,” he said, “for murder requires a mind. You are capable only of dinosaurslaughter. You and your ilk are incapable of devising increasingly effective methods of destroying your own species and, at the same time, increasingly miraculous methods of keeping it extant. You will never live to know the two-party system, the multi-party system, and the one-party system. You will be gone long before I have made this the best of all possible worlds, no matter how possible all other worlds may be. In your highest state of evolution you could not develop the brain cells to prove innocent men guilty, even after their acquittal. You are all wrong in the crotch, and in the cranium, and in the cortex. But I have wasted enough time on you. I must use these fingers which God gave me, and now probably wishes He had kept for Himself, to begin writing those noble volumes about Me which will one day run to several hundred billion items, many of them about war, death, conquest, decline, fall, blood, sweat, tears, threats, warnings, boasts, hopelessness, hell, heels, and whores. There will be little enough about you and your ilk and your kith and your kin, for after all, who were you and your ilk and your kith and your kin? Good day and goodbye,” said Man in conclusion. “I shall see to it that your species receives a decent burial, with some simple ceremony.”

Man, as it turned out, was right. The dinosaur and his ilk and his kith and his kin died not long after, still in lower case, but with a curious smile of satisfaction, or something of the sort, on their ephemeral faces.

MORAL: The noblest study of mankind is Man, says Man.

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