Ishmael Final Chapters

Chapter ten begins with the pupil seeking out his missing teacher. He goes on quite the chase, his failures due mostly in part to his being unable to admit that he's actually searching for a gorilla and not a person. When he finally finds Ishmael, on exhibit in a circus of sorts, the reader goes on the same journey as the pupil does: How could this happen to him? How could people treat him this way? Why did he let himself be subdued in this way? It's amazing how much more sympathy we have for an animal when we know that it is human-like. Even though, most of our lives we know this to be true anyway-- we usually quiet that voice in our minds, and insist that it's okay to mistreat animals because we are above them. But I suppose the book's already delved into that.

Ishmael and his student argue a bit at first about his current circumstances, but they end up going on as usual; Continuing the lesson from the point they left off, after the fall of Adam and murder of Abel's reinterpretation. I have to admit I was a bit jarred that they continued on so fluidly. I almost wish they had spent a bit more time in the "how" and "why" of their new circumstances, being that it's a bit odd for them to be continuing this lesson as usual being in a circus. In the new lesson one of my favorite parts was when they're talking about the Takers' view of the past: "...we're a very 'new' people. Every generation is somehow new, more thoroughly cut off from the past than the one that came before." I found this very interesting, as I've always been a bit obsessed with how life circles around in that way. Each generation seems to be doomed to repeat a cycle something along the lines of this: starting out a 'new' way of thinking which divides them from previous generations, unifying in that new mindset, growing older in that mindset and starting families of their own, raising their kids in that mindset until they're old enough to start their new way of thinking, making the older generation suddenly outdated, 'conservative,' and often times unwelcome to the new thinking. I'm not even sure if this is exactly what Ishmael and his student were getting at, but it's where my mind took me. (Some light reading on generational theories.) Bringing it back to that excerpt though, this particular cycle lends to the Takers' way of thinking that he's pointing out in this section: That the people alive today are smarter than any people who have ever been alive, and we are more advanced and more capable of life than anything else that has ever been on Earth. I love how this book has made me so aware of this mindset and it's dangers.

An interesting section; If everyone knew the teachings of Ishmael to be true, would we care?

The book wraps up with talking about the prison that the Taker culture puts us in, which is our stubborn need for power and "Consuming the world." Ishmael and his student disagree on one point in this section, which is that Ishmael believes humans could agree that destroying the cultural prison of the Takers' is something everyone could agree is worth striving for. His student argues that even in the event that every person involved in Taker culture heard Ishmael's lessons, they would still buy into Mother Culture and not "give a damn that it's a prison and . . . [not] give a damn that it's destroying the world." Unfortunately, with everything we've learned in this class I'm inclined to believe that the student is more likely to be right in this disagreement.

In the end, when Ishmael has declared his lessons finished, his student sets out to rescue him from his imprisonment at the circus. Instead, he discovers that Ishmael has died. The ending of the book really wraps a bow on the package for me. I think that Ishmael dying is the only way to have made all of their interactions and all of his teachings more impactful and eternal. Overall this book was a great complement to Eaarth; reading them so closely together was a very powerful experience for me.