“Let us love this distance that is woven completely by friendship, because those who love each other do not separate,” wrote Simone Weil reflecting on her soul about the paradox of closeness and separation. Being separated from someone you love – in space or in silence, by choice or circumstance – is one devastating experience. It takes a lot of mental effort to keep yourself from feeling abandoned, and we know from fMRI research that all abandonment occurs as a mini-death because the brain registers the death of a loved one – the ultimate abandonment – as a sudden and inexplicable separation.
We might call that a lot of effort faith.
The wives of whalers had it when their husbands went on perilous voyages of months or years—the faith that time and chance would smile on that precious life in the deep turbulent waters. Parents experience it when their child takes those first steps, does that first thing, goes to college — the faith that through all the growing stages of isolation and separation, some unbreakable bond of love will remain. Friends and lovers have it each time they say goodbye – the faith that it won't be the last kiss.
But no one in the history of the world has ever had as much faith in the face of separation and uncertainty as a penguin.
Penguins breed throughout their lives and lay one egg a year, which the parents take turns incubating and nursing as they each go out to sea to hunt for food. The separation can last for months, during which the hungry parent protecting the egg must maintain a strong faith in the return of the mate—because if they too leave the nursery in search of food, the egg will perish.
The incredible level of that faith and heroic patience it takes to bring a penguin to life on the pages Antarctic Travel (public library) – a collaboration between ornithologist and conservationist Ronald Lockley and novelist Richard Adams, traveling together in the tropics ten years after Adams wrote a manuscript that was repeatedly rejected and turned into a modern classic. Watership Down.
Celebrating the emperor penguin as a “miracle of antarctic evolution” – its six-month courtship, its enormous single-file march to places remembered by children far from the ocean, its dedication to raising children – Adams writes:
In frozen hatcheries no food is available. The sea recedes slowly – perhaps as much as 125 kilometers – as the winter ice moves outward from Antarctica.
When finally, in May, the female lays one large egg (about 0.5 kg), there is great excitement and the same “talking”. The male waits for her appearance carefully, and with his curved beak at once rolls her to her feet and ascends to a sort of pouch between her legs, where she is protected by the great flap of feathery skin of the abdomen and warmed by contact with the naked, hidden skin of the young. If he didn't do this, the egg would freeze within a minute. Exhausted from her efforts, and starving, having lost a lot of weight during the long rush to mate and lay eggs, the female now swims in the sea, climbs down the slopes and sleeps for a while among the snowy hills.
It takes her days, even weeks, to reach open water, where she begins to restore her body fat – a long recovery of vitality before she returns to nursery at the end of the two-month incubation period. At that time, the males live in a tight enclosure known as testwhich allows them to increase their body temperature and avoid being blown away by dangerous polars. It is only when the female comes back to take care of raising the children that the male, weak and hungry, cannot go to the sea to refresh himself, after persisting for a long time without relying entirely on her return.
Adams marvels at this incredible act of faith:
A man's strong, heroic dedication to his work as an incubator and nurse must be unique in nature, involving such an almost incredibly long rush under conditions of exposure to extreme frost that would kill most living creatures. At last it is rewarded, while the rookery is without sun in July, with the return of its mate, fat and full of belly from his long journey among the krill and small fish. He had an even longer walk back to the stall, as the water ice was still building far out at sea. It usually comes a few days after the chick is born at a time when, when it is hungry, it starts sticking its head in the air and cries for food. The male, through unusual natural provision, produces enough nutritious fluid from the gall bladder and stomach to keep the baby alive until the female arrives.
On the testimony of the voice as the seal of the soul, Adams adds:
When the female returns, she calls and recognizes her mate by voice. This is a type of ceremony, which may take time, since after two months of testudo and other movements, the spouse will probably not be where he left her to nurse the precious egg. When the vocal praise ceremony is over, the female urges her mate to give her the chick. Within seconds it is transferred to his wallet. The male, on the other hand, is now free to make a long journey to the feeding ground at sea… And here we bring out another remarkable and unusual provision of nature: the mother can not only live on the fat in her body but also store the contents of her stomach to produce enough daily food to keep the chick going until the return of the male.
That penguins have survived by an act of faith since they first separated from albatross 71 million years ago is not only a miracle of evolution – where next to impossible and surprising things like the eye of the scallop, the periodicity of the cicada, and REM – but a living proof of patience as a guardian of love, the absence of possible experience, the absence of abandoning the possibility of death. Only in love – its tenacity, faith in it, the infinity of situations it can take – makes life more stubborn than death.
