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 The
Cubbyhole
By Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
I once visited an aquarium where each
fish kept to his own area. I was struck by how sensitive some
of them were to everything they encountered in their incessant
and idle meandering through their respective liquid media:
contact with any speck of vegetation, a minute piece of wire,
even a bubble of air would immediately have an effect on their
choice of direction, and their movements.
I then became curious to know how sensitive
the fish were to what happened beyond the sheet of glass,
which took up one whole side of the aquarium and allowed the
visitors to observe them. What an illusion! They literally
went so far as to place their mouths - and one could almost
say, their eyes - on the glass. But the fish were insensitive
to everything that went on beyond: a hand resting on the glass,
gesticulating fingers, rapping on the glass - none of this
caused the least sensation. The world outside the aquarium
could come crashing down, and the fish would not pay the slightest
attention to it as long as nothing happened inside their little
liquid world.
I think of these fish when I consider
the attitude of some of my contemporaries - and not a few
of them - upon receiving news and commentaries about today's
world through the television, the radio and the press. With
increasing frequency, they deal with individual, local, and
even national catastrophes. At times even the destruction
of the world in a nuclear hecatomb is discussed. The person
who hears these reports remains indifferent as long as they
do not cause immediate repercussions in the cubbyhole of each
one's petty private life.
Symptom of frightful corruption, aberrant
contradictions, vertiginous indications of psychic imbalances
in whole social groups - none of this is relevant as long
as each one's petty life continues unaltered for a few more
days, or rather, a few more hours.
This attitude puzzles me. And just
as in front of the aquarium I had the desire, fortunately
controlled, to puncture the glass and poke the fish in order
to make them really feel the reality of this external world
I was in, and which they ignored with such unintelligent disdain,
I also have the desire to break through some "sheets"
of glass behind which some contemporary "fish" live
esconced only in their own little world, indifferent to the
one outside.
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