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A review by jensaperstein
A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons by Robert M. Sapolsky
4.0
An elegy, hidden in what is otherwise a light-hearted memoir:
"I write these words years later and I still have not found a Prayer for the Dead for the baboons. As a child, when I believed in the orthodoxy of my people, I learned the Kaddish. Once I said it in stunned, mechanical obeisance to my tradition at the open grave of my father, but it glorifies the actions and caprices of a god who does not exist for me, so that prayer does not come for these baboons. I have been told that in primate centers in Japan, Shinto prayers are offered to honor the monkeys that have been killed, and that the prayers are hybrids of the prayer for a dead animal offered by the successful hunter and the prayer for a dead enemy offered by the successful soldier. But even though I stalk these animals with my blowgun and I quicken at a darting, I swear that I have never been their hunter and they have never been my enemy. So that prayer does not come for these baboons. In a world already filled with so many words of lamentation, no words have come to me. And instead, these baboons only remain as ashes in my head. With the ashes of my father’s dementia and my science that moved too slowly to help him. With the ashes of my ancestors in the death camps. With the ashes of Lisa’s tears when I have been a monster to her. With the ashes of the rats dead in my lab. With the ashes of my depressions and my bad back that aches more each year. With the ashes of the hungry Masai children who watch me now as I type, wondering if they will be fed here today."
"I write these words years later and I still have not found a Prayer for the Dead for the baboons. As a child, when I believed in the orthodoxy of my people, I learned the Kaddish. Once I said it in stunned, mechanical obeisance to my tradition at the open grave of my father, but it glorifies the actions and caprices of a god who does not exist for me, so that prayer does not come for these baboons. I have been told that in primate centers in Japan, Shinto prayers are offered to honor the monkeys that have been killed, and that the prayers are hybrids of the prayer for a dead animal offered by the successful hunter and the prayer for a dead enemy offered by the successful soldier. But even though I stalk these animals with my blowgun and I quicken at a darting, I swear that I have never been their hunter and they have never been my enemy. So that prayer does not come for these baboons. In a world already filled with so many words of lamentation, no words have come to me. And instead, these baboons only remain as ashes in my head. With the ashes of my father’s dementia and my science that moved too slowly to help him. With the ashes of my ancestors in the death camps. With the ashes of Lisa’s tears when I have been a monster to her. With the ashes of the rats dead in my lab. With the ashes of my depressions and my bad back that aches more each year. With the ashes of the hungry Masai children who watch me now as I type, wondering if they will be fed here today."