The Roots of Heaven. Romain Gary.

The Roots of Heaven
Romain Gary
New York: Time Incorporated, 1958.

Why read it? Novel. Morel is the moral of this story. Defender of the elephants in Africa and laughingstock to most of the people around him, he mounts a campaign to gather signatures to stop the slaughter of elephants in Africa. However, he is not just defending the elephants, who are a symbol of freedom, man’s freedom. He is trying to show men that they can be the sensitive, moral, compassionate creatures that they are in potential. His selfless obsession for saving the elephants attracts a number of people who have other agendas—but their agendas fade as Morel’s quest to save the elephants takes on a higher purpose—to save men from their own self-destruction. For what they do to the elephants, they will do to themselves. Morel is confident that he will achieve his goal, so confident, so sure, that he fears not for his safety. He is the exemplar of what he wants men to become.

Sample ideas from the book: “When people gt very old, their faces tend to jell once for all into a single expression: they aren’t easily stirred.” “When you live too long you end up knowing nobody.” “I had several times in those distant days, sent him money taken from my own meager pay, in response to pressing letters, and of course he had never forgiven me for that.” “I don’t know where the English dug up all that damned self-assurance.” “…proved me better qualified to deal with wild animals than with human beings.” “Well, she was just another animal who needed protection.” “He did not tell her who he was or where he came from, but began to talk to her about elephants, as if they were the only thing that mattered.”

“Always cheerful with the cheerfulness of a man who has gone deep down into things and come back reassured.” “You see, I told you so: they all come here with their own obsessions.” “His [Fields’s] deep conviction that he was to die one day of cancer of the prostate…was largely responsible for his cold-blooded courage and the reputation for total indifference to danger which he enjoyed in his profession.” “His madness must consist in just that: a certain basic inability to be discouraged or to despair…a happy idiot who refuses to give in to the evidence of hopelessness.” “He’s sincerely convinced that nothing can happen to him. His real madness is to think himself surrounded by universal sympathy and approval.” “And all this for the sake of elephants! I’ve seen some liberty-loving maniacs and anarchists in my time, but this—this went beyond everything.”

“…the valuable stimulus of contradiction.” “Nearly all the people in this novel are a little crazy.” “He couldn’t bear the sight of cruelty, and when he became angry, that was always the reason.” “…a magnificent elephant with tusks weighing seventy pounds, which crumpled at his feet with all the humility of death.” “…and his last words were the most terrible, the most outrageous and frightening ever heard. ‘I want to live’ muttered those remains of a man.” “…so much that when I fall to praying—everyone has his moments of weakness—it is that I may go one day wherever dead elephants go when the moment comes.” “…Father Tassin, in his writings, represented salvation as a mere biological mutation, and humanity, in the form in which we still know it, as an archaic species doomed to joining other vanished species in the obscurity of a prehistoric past.”

Quote: “I first began thinking about the elephants during the war, when I was a prisoner in Germany, probably because they were the most different thing I could imagine from what surrounded me: they were the very image of an immense liberty…. We held on to the image of that gigantic liberty and somehow it helped us to survive.”