2023-07-18 23:32:36
The old man and the sea and a dog. Tim Shaddock, Pacific Ocean, Bella. For three months, man and dog drifted at sea, destroying the radio equipment, the catamaran unnavigable. That this time would ever end, that rescue would come – the man will despair at this question, the animal does not think in days, months, has no idea of finiteness. The man will also have lost it. When did he stop counting the days, the weeks? The story of these two castaways is a drama of epic proportions.
They lived on raw fish that the man caught, they drank the rainwater that the man caught or the catamaran in its cavities, maybe there were also vessels. they shared. Was it always enough? Did the man ever think of pointing the knife he used to cut up the fish at his dog?
If custom of the sea, as a custom of the sea, cannibalism among shipwrecked people was still valid in the 19th century, it was only the right thing to do, so the leather shoes were already worn out and the person to be eaten was drawn by lot. Has the millennia-old companionship of man and dog held back the man Shaddock? Or maybe there was always enough that he didn’t thirst for Bella’s blood. This shipwreck provides endless food for the imagination.
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Bella, Australian Tim Shaddock’s dog, after rescuing the two castaways.Grupomar/Atun Tuny /AP
This shipwreck provides endless food for the imagination
At night the man and the dog will have warmed and comforted each other. But was there enough space under the piece of fabric that protected from the scorching sun? When did the ship become a Darwinian place, and when did useless love for the survival of the fittest triumph? Or wasn’t it precisely this that served survival? Because it can’t just have been about food and water. It was also about not losing your sanity and hope. Tim wouldn’t have made it without Bella and Bella wouldn’t have made it without Tim.
On the abstract level, this is a story of how to come to terms with your choices, what arrangements you might have to make when it comes to survival. So that life has meaning. In his essay Why Do We Look at Animals, artist John Berger writes that the animal offers companionship to the loneliness of the human species. Hardly anyone will have experienced the deep truth of this sentence like Tim Shaddock.
Australian Tim Shaddock after being rescued by a Mexican tuna boat. Grupomar/Atun Tuny
No, Tim Shaddock was not drifting aimlessly on the endless ocean. Bella gave his existence direction, composure, as only relation to another being establishes, and be it a connection across that narrow abyss of ignorance that John Berger writes of. And further: The animal observes the human being closely. Only man becomes aware of himself by returning the gaze.
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