Our Simian Cousins

I miss New York in the same way Dave Frischberg does, but the news feeds from the dailies there are best taken with a dose of what Ortega y Gasset has to say about our simian cousins.

"Nowhere do we better observe that the possibility of meditation is in truth the essential attribute of man than at the zoo, before the cages of our cousins the monkeys. The bird and crustacean are forms of life too remote from our own for us to see, comparing them with ourselves, anything but gross, abstract differences, vague by their very extremity. But the ape is so like ourselves that it invites us to pursue the comparison, to discover more concrete and fertile differences."
"If we are able to remain still for a time in passive contemplation of the simian scene, one of its characteristics will presently, and as if spontaneously, become dominant and strike us like a flash of lightning. And this is that the infernal little beasts are constantly on the alert, perpetually uneasy, looking and listening for all the signals that reach them from their surroundings, intent upon their environment as if they feared some constant peril in it, to which they must automatically respond by flight or bite, the mechanical discharge of a muscular reflex. The creature, in short, lives in perpetual fear of the world, and at the same time in a perpetual hunger for the things that are and appear in the world, in an ungovernable hunger which also discharges itself without any possible restraint or inhibition, just as fear does.
"In either case it is the objects and events in its surroundings which govern the animal's life, which pull it and push it about like a marionette. It does not rule its own life, it does not live from itself, but is always alert to what is going on outside it to what is other than itself. Our spanish word 'otro' (other) is nothing but the Latin 'alter.' To say, then, that the animal lives not from itself but from what is other than itself, pushed and pulled and tyrannized over by that other, is equivalent to saying that the animal always lives in estrangement, is beside itself, that its life is essentially 'alteractión' (other-ation, otherness, a state of tumult)."

The essay 'The Self and the Other' is found in José Ortega Y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture.