While the wife’s birthday party was in progress, I inveigled our grandson, just two years and a half, to leave the room and come with me. I remembered that near the lobby was an aquarium that contained fish and crustaceans, from which customers may pick a suitable specimen for the dinner, and the prospect of seeing them in situ proved too exciting for the boy to pass up and remain at his mother’s side.
On the way we passed by an empty function room. Out of curiosity, we stopped by it and peered. The darkness inside contrasted with the lighted hallway, and the silence there, with the loud music and animated talk coming out of the room across from it, where the wife was having her celebration. The empty chairs that loomed in the interior seemed occupied, but it was just the imagination that supplied whatever was missing in the picture. Still, who knows what thoughts came to the boy, because his hold on my hand tightened, and I myself felt a strangeness, an apprehension.
I deemed it time for us to move on and proceed to near the building entrance. There, put end to end were two aquaria. A lighting system gave them a glow, which redeemed the drabness of the walls into which they were set. In one of the tanks were four groupers. I did not see lobsters or crabs, they were probably now having their moment swimming in sauce on one of the tables. But there were eels in the other tank, and alternately the boy stared at them and on the fish. None of them stirred. Fish and eels (“snakes,” I told the boy for convenience) could have a deeper sleep than humans. It was the snakes, however, that claimed the boy’s better attention. I was holding him up to tank level and could feel a tremor of thrill in his body when his eyes panned to them. If he was depressed by the ghostly chairs in the empty function room, somehow his spirits were lifted up by the snakes in the lighted aquarium.
This made me think of the Israelites in the desert. When they were nibbled by venomous reptiles, the Lord told Moses to put the figure of a snake on a pole, and whichever of those who were bitten that looked at it would be saved.
In fact, Jesus used this image in speaking of his death. In John’s Gospel, alluding to his being nailed to and raised on the cross, Jesus said that, like the serpent on a pole, the Son of Man would be lifted up “so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”
And like a judge, Jesus added that those who do not believe already are condemned and sentenced, in that, “though the light has come into the world, men have shown they prefer darkness to the light because their deeds were evil.”
St. Augustine had these men in mind when he wrote, “It is no advantage to be near the light if the eyes are closed.”
Together with the eyes, one can close one’s ears. We once had a help who would feign sleep when she was called, and would not answer even if shouted at. She could not wake up because she was not sleeping, and she could not answer because to all appearances she was asleep.
Were the eels really asleep, were their eyes actually shut to the light, and their ears closed as well? Or were they awake, but their eyes or ears, or both of them, were closed or open?
What a game we would have when we return to the aquarium and I will ask the boy these questions. Perhaps, before he answers, I shall allow him to peer into the tank and pound on the glass to check if the eels are really asleep or awake. Perhaps, I should give him enough growing time to know more, not just about eels, but also about darkness and light, and then at the proper moment answer these questions as though they were in fact about himself.