I can't go on, I'll go on; The Way We Are Allen Wheelis W.W. Norton: 160 pp., $23.95 HOME EDITION

• Published in: The Los Angeles times
• Main Author: Kirsch, Jonathan
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, Calif Los Angeles Times Communications LLC 13.08.2006
• Subjects: Books-titles; Nonfiction; Psychology; Way We Are, The; Wheelis, Allen
• ISSN: 0458-3035

For example, [Allen Wheelis] confronts us with the unpleasant but unavoidable fact that life feeds on life, no matter how diligently we distance ourselves from what goes on in the slaughterhouse. "Poet and philosopher sit to meat, speak of love, charity, rights of man, sacredness of life," he muses. "Far away blood flows, cries rise in the night." And he insists that human beings do not simply kill to eat and eat to live: He draws an unbroken line from the abattoir to the worst atrocities human beings are capable of committing. "There is no good man," he concludes. "We all are killers, we live on others." Indeed, Wheelis holds that the lower orders of life are far better off than Homo sapiens precisely because, as far as we know, animals are not cursed with self-awareness. "There is no knowledge of death, no watching of one's fateful progression, no history, no vision of one's actual condition," he writes, "hence no need to transcend that condition." After a million years of evolution, the human animal has finally achieved consciousness, but it's all bad news, according to Wheelis. "This is the Fall," he intones. "Culture is about to begin." Culture, according to Wheelis, is only a way of describing the various "schemes" by which humankind seeks to redeem itself from the sure knowledge that life is nasty, brutish and short. "If [man] can find such a scheme and make his life 'mean' something in it, that is, contribute to it, make a difference, he will have ferried something of his mortal self across the gulf of death to become a part of something that will live on." But Wheelis seems to suggest that all such schemes are essentially pretty lies we tell ourselves to hide an unendurable truth. "The immediate horror man perceives is his own death, but beyond that he begins to see the entire life process as carnage, as eating and being eaten," he writes. "A terrible screaming pervades the universe. Man is the first to hear it. This is the vision we cannot accept. It drives toward madness or despair."