ANCHORAGE - An Eagle River man mauled by a brown bear over the weekend is still in the hospital, but 57-year-old Howard Meyer says he's grateful to be alive.The line ("I was screaming at the bear, basically screaming at myself...") recalls one of my favorite passages in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past:
âI was screaming at the bear, basically screaming at myself, you know, and thinking this is the end,â Meyer said Tuesday.
It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognize that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. Were we to meet a brigand on the road, we might perhaps succeed in making him sensible of his own personal interest if not of our plight. But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no meaning than the sounds of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.Can you see the connection? This discoursing in front of an octopus is the same as screaming at a bear. You are discoursing to yourself; you are screaming at yourself.
Lucky for the bear, the Alaskan turned out to be a fine human being:
Fish and Game have no plan to shoot the bear, and Meyer is fine with that, because to him it was just a bear being a bear.
