Lambs to Slaughter

“We are like lambs in a field,” wrote Schopenhauer in “On the Sufferings of The World,” continuing, “disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.” It’s fate that’s our butcher. Unlike the lambs, who never know the butcher is sharpening his blade, we sense the ravages of time that determine our fate. Ever the cheerful guy, Schopes points out that it’s work, worry, labor and trouble that define our days. However, as an old Kantian, he offers a reasoning: “But if all wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how would men occupy their lives? what would they do with their time? If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves.”

This is all somehow applicable to the world of Blandings Castle as created by P.G. Wodehouse. In his novel of gluttonous abandon chronicling a sow-fattening contest, “Pigs Have Wings,” the butler Beach, when caught in the cross hairs of Galahand, is described thus: “But his jaw had fallen, and he was looking at his visitor rather in the manner of the lamb mentioned by the philosopher Schopenhauer when closeted with the butcher.” Now the simile doesn’t quite bear itself out, if one is supposed to get the impression that Beach is terrified, since the lambs are never aware of their fate. However, Wodehouse’s double anthropomorphic somersault maneuver might just work, given that Beach is one of only a few characters in the novel with a greater self awareness than the pigs.

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