Technical reasons. I’ve found that if I use animals, it makes it easier to suspend my readers’ disbelief. We tend to know our own species very well, so we’re cynical about human characters. That means it’s easier for me to tell a story about a dentist who is a donkey than it is for me to tell a story about a dentist who is just a regular person. Also, I find it refreshing to get away from humans. We are, after all, the only species that lives in such isolation from other species. Now, you live in a city, don’t you? So how many other species besides your own have you seen today? As you were walking to work, you might have noticed some pigeons, maybe some squirrels… And do you have a pet at home? So today you only saw some pigeons. Any other animal in nature would have been surrounded by and aware of dozens of species. It’s two books actually: a novel and an essay, each approaching the same subject in different ways. They’ll be published in one volume, back to back, upside down. In this way readers are empowered to choose which one they want to read first. Do they prefer to use their reason by reading an essay, or do they prefer to use their imagination by reading a novel? Most fiction dealing with the holocaust uses a single literary code, that of realism. It’s about Jews and it’s set in Europe between 1933 and 1945 and it almost always follows the same narrative arc. The problem with that is that in order for us to deal with this horrible, evil event, we have to be able to approach it in many ways. So what I am trying to do with this book, both in the essay and more obviously in the novel, is to take a non-realistic, allegorical approach. This is something very few writers have tried. A good story and a good religion work in the same way. It’s called “suspension of disbelief” in fiction. It’s called “faith” in religion. A story only works if we let it work, if we open our hearts to it. The saddest thing on earth is people who have no stories. You find a lot of people like that here in the West—people who are profoundly cynical and who have no imagination. Often they don’t read anything at all. They just watch TV and do their jobs. What gives sense to living is some sort of faith—religious, romantic, or political—and faith can’t be had through reason. I am not particularly denominational. I think all religions are trying to approach the same mystery and that there are different religions for the same reason that there are different cuisines. There’s Chinese food, there’s Italian and Mexican. They all feed the stomach, just in different ways. What I find interesting, though, is that religions always tell stories. Religions always have characters and the characters tell tales. Both the Buddha and Jesus, for example, taught by telling stories or parables. So that’s what’s interesting about people with religious faith—they interpret life through a story. When people believe in a particular religion, everything comes to them through the story of that religion. That story becomes the tool they use to make sense of the world. It’s sort of dwindled now because I’ve been so busy, but I did yoga for years. I used to do an hour and a half every day. I started with Shivananda yoga and then I started doing Iyengar and ashtanga. That was one thing that lost me. I had too many gurus and I started picking and choosing from the different practices, which is a good way to get lost. That’s how the ego starts to swell. But I love yoga. Yoga is one of the greatest discoveries of my life. I’d love to. One problem with getting back into it, though, is that yoga is not just an exercise. It’s a whole way of life, one that doesn’t fit into our capitalist society because it’s not considered productive. Yogic breathing, pranayama, for example—what use does our society have for that? If your lifestyle is typical of a Western person—getting up and working nine hours a day—it’s hard to fit yoga into your life. The same thing is true with meditation; it’s hard to work in, but we’ve got to try. It was transformative. We tend to live in a society that is in denial of death. Most of us are not religious, so we don’t encounter the religious allegories and metaphors of death. We live longer and longer and we die in hospitals. So we live very far from death, which we think makes us happier, but living like that makes us forget to value life. It’s the very fact that life will end that makes us value it, and not waste it with frivolity. What palliative care did to me was blow away a lot of triviality. It’s hard to be frivolous after you spend time with people who are dying. After that you tend to naturally focus on things that are important.
