[My retelling of Samuel Johnson’s story of the human screech-owl for the modern age:]
We like to distinguish people by the animals we suppose they resemble. A hero is called a lion, the shy and retiring person a mouse, the owner of a payday loan company gains the title of vulture, a clever politician is as cunning as a fox. There is another kind of character found in the world, a species of being in human form which may be called the screech-owls of humankind.
These human screech-owls believe that it is their great duty to complain. They disturb the happiness of others, they lessen little comforts, they shorten the short pleasures of human life, by recalling painful episodes of the past, and by making sad predictions about the future. They crush the rising hope, dampen the kindling flame of joy, and darken the golden hours of gaiety with the hateful gloom of grief and suspicion.
If a weakness of your spirits causes you to be more sensitive to the feelings and impressions of others, if, in other words, you are apt to suffer by fascination and to catch the contagion of misery, you will find it extremely unhappy to live within the sound of a screech-owl’s voice. That screeching will fill your ears in your hours of dejection, it terrify you with fears and apprehensions which you would never have thought of yourself, it will sadden a day which you might otherwise have passed in necessary business or in recreation. That voice will burden your heart with unnecessary discontent, and it will weaken for a time that love of life which you need for any serious undertaking.
Though I have many weaknesses, as we all do, I have never been charged with an excess of superstition. When I don’t walk under a ladder, it’s not because I fear bad luck but because I don’t want the worker standing above me to drop a hammer on my head. I don’t bother to cross to the other side of the street to avoid a black cat crossing my path. I have never discovered that when the thirteenth day of the month falls on a Friday, I have any greater or lesser amount of luck. I throw chain letters in the recycle bin without a qualm. Yet for all that I am not superstitious, I have to admit that I consider it an unhappy day when I happen to be greeted in the morning by Suspirius, the human screech-owl.
I have now known Suspirius for forty-nine years and four months, and I have never yet passed an hour with him in which he has not made some attack upon my quiet. We were first acquainted when we were in school together, and in those days he would speak at length about how miserable it was to be young and have no money. Whenever we spent time together, he told me about pleasures of which I had never heard, which I couldn’t have because I hadn’t enough money, and which I never would have thought of missing, if only he hadn’t told me of them. Continue reading “Suspirius”