Dear mister elephant,

As you read this letter, you will no doubt be wondering what could have prompted a zoological specimen so deeply concerned about the future of his own species to write it.

The instinct for self-preservation is, of course, the reason.

For a very long time now, I have felt that our fates are intertwined. In these perilous days of ‘balance through terror’, of massacres and complex calculations regarding the number of humans who will survive a nuclear holocaust, it is only natural that my thoughts turn to you.

In my eyes, dearest mister elephant, you perfectly embody everything that is today threatened with extinction in the name of progress, efficiency, total materialism, ideology or even reason—for a certain abstract and inhuman use of reason and logic is increasingly becoming an accomplice to our murderous madness.

It seems clear today that we have behaved towards other species, and yours in particular, in exactly the same way as we are about to do towards ourselves.

It was in a child’s bedroom, nearly half a century ago, that we first met.

For years we shared the same bed, and I never fell asleep without kissing your trunk, then holding you tight in my arms, until the day my mother took you away, saying—not without a certain lack of logic—that I was now too big a boy to play with an elephant.

There will no doubt be psychologists who claim that my ‘fixation’ on elephants stems from that painful separation, and that my desire to share your company is in fact a form of nostalgia for my lost childhood and innocence.

And it is quite true that, in my eyes, you represent a symbol of purity and a naive dream—that of a world where man and beast would live together in peace.

Years later, somewhere in Sudan, we met again. I was returning from a bombing mission over Ethiopia and landed my plane, in a sorry state, south of Khartoum, on the west bank of the Nile. I walked for three days before finding water and something to drink, for which I subsequently paid with a bout of typhoid that nearly cost me my life.

You appeared to me through a few sparse carob trees and at first I thought I was hallucinating. For you were red, a deep red, from trunk to tail, and the sight of a red elephant purring whilst sitting on its hindquarters made my hair stand on end. Yes indeed! you were purring. I have since learnt that this deep rumbling is a sign of contentment for you, which leads me to suppose that the bark of the tree you were eating was particularly delicious.

It took me a while to realise that the reason you were red was because you’d been wallowing in the mud, which meant there was water nearby. I moved forward slowly, and at that moment you noticed me.

You pricked up your ears and your head seemed to triple in size, whilst your body, like a mountain, vanished behind that suddenly raised canopy. The distance between us was no more than twenty metres, and not only could I see your eyes, but I was acutely aware of your gaze, which struck me, so to speak, like a punch to the stomach.

It was too late to think of fleeing.

And then, in the state of exhaustion I was in, fever and thirst overcame my fear.
I gave up the fight.

This happened to me several times during the war: I would close my eyes, waiting for death, which earned me a medal and a reputation for bravery every single time.

When I opened my eyes again, you were asleep. I imagine you hadn’t seen me, or worse, you’d merely glanced at me before drifting off to sleep. In any case, you were there; your trunk limp, your ears drooping, your eyelids lowered, and, I remember, my eyes filled with tears.

I was seized by an almost irresistible urge to approach you, to press your trunk against me, to snuggle up against the leather of your skin and then, safe and sound, to fall peacefully asleep.

A most strange feeling came over me. It was my mother, I knew, who had sent you. She had finally relented and you had been returned to me.

I took a step towards you, then another…

For a man as utterly exhausted as I was at that moment, there was something strangely reassuring about your enormous, rock-like mass. I was convinced that if I could just touch you, stroke you, lean against you, you would impart some of your life-force to me.

It was one of those moments when a man needs so much energy, so much strength, that he might even call upon God. I have never been able to raise my gaze that high, I have always stopped at the elephants.

I was right beside you when I stumbled and fell.

That was when the ground shook beneath me and the most dreadful din—the sort that a thousand donkeys braying in unison might produce—reduced my heart to the state of a caged grasshopper.

In fact, I was screaming too, and in my roars lay all the terrible strength of a two-month-old baby. Immediately afterwards, whilst still yelping in terror, I had to break every record set by racing rabbits.

It certainly seemed as though some of your power had been infused into me, for never has a half-dead man come back to life more quickly to make such a swift getaway.
In fact, we were both fleeing, but in opposite directions.

We were moving further apart, you snorting, me yelping, and as I needed all my energy, there was no question of me trying to control all my muscles. But let’s move on from that, if you don’t mind. And anyway, what can you do? An act of bravery sometimes has these little physiological repercussions. After all, hadn’t I frightened an elephant

We never met again, and yet, in our frustrated, limited, controlled, catalogued, stifled existence, the echo of your irresistible, thunderous march across the vast expanses of Africa never ceases to reach me, and it stirs within me a vague longing.

It resounds triumphantly as the end of submission and servitude, as an echo of that infinite freedom which has haunted our souls ever since they were first oppressed.

I hope you will not take it as a lack of respect if I confess that your stature, your strength and your ardent aspiration for an unhindered existence obviously render you entirely anachronistic.

Thus you are regarded as incompatible with the present age.

But to all of us who are weary of our polluted cities and our even more polluted thoughts, your colossal presence, your survival against all odds, serves as a reassuring message.
All is not yet lost; the last hope of freedom has not yet completely vanished from this earth, and who knows? If we stop destroying elephants and prevent them from disappearing, perhaps we shall also succeed in protecting our own species from our own efforts at extermination.

If humankind proves capable of showing respect for life in its most formidable and cumbersome form – come now, come now, don’t prick up your ears or raise your trunk in anger, I didn’t mean to offend you – then there remains a chance that China is not a harbinger of the future that awaits us, but that the individual, that other cumbersome and clumsy prehistoric monster, will somehow manage to survive.

Years ago, I met a Frenchman who had devoted himself, body and soul, to saving the African elephant.

Somewhere, on the green, stormy sea of what was then known as the territory of Chad, beneath the stars that always seem to shine more brightly when a man’s voice manages to rise above his solitude, he said to me:

‘Dogs are no longer enough. People have never felt more lost, more alone than they do today; they need companionship, a friendship more powerful, more reliable than any we have ever known. Something that can really stand the test of time. Dogs aren’t enough anymore. What we need are elephants.’

And who knows? Perhaps we will have to seek a companionship infinitely greater, even more powerful still…

I can almost detect a hint of irony in your eyes as you read my letter. And no doubt you are pricking up your ears out of deep mistrust of any rumour that comes from man.
Has anyone ever told you that your ear is almost exactly the shape of the African continent? Your rock-like grey matter even has the colour and appearance of the earth, our mother. Your eyelashes have something unfamiliar about them that almost makes one think of a little girl’s, whilst your rear end resembles that of a monstrous puppy.

Over thousands of years, you have been hunted for your meat and your ivory, but it was civilised man who came up with the idea of killing you for his own pleasure and turning you into a trophy.

Everything within us that is fear, frustration, weakness and uncertainty seems to find some neurotic comfort in killing the most powerful of all earthly creatures. This gratuitous act gives us that sort of ‘manly’ confidence which casts a strange light on the nature of our manhood.

There are people, of course, who claim that you are of no use, that you ruin crops in a country ravaged by famine, that humanity already has enough survival problems to deal with without taking on the issue of elephants as well. In fact, they argue that you are a luxury we can no longer afford.

This is exactly the sort of argument used by totalitarian regimes, from Stalin to Mao, via Hitler, to demonstrate that a truly rational society cannot afford the luxury of individual freedom.

Human rights, too, are a kind of elephant.

The right to hold a contrary opinion, to think freely, the right to resist and challenge authority—these are values that can very easily be curbed and suppressed in the name of productivity, efficiency, ‘the greater good’ and total rationalism.

In a concentration camp in Germany, during the last world war, you, dear elephant, played the role of a rescuer.

Locked behind barbed wire, my friends thought of the herds of elephants that roamed the endless plains of Africa with a thunderous roar, and the image of that living, irresistible freedom helped those prisoners to survive.

If the world can no longer afford the luxury of this natural beauty, it will soon succumb to its own ugliness, and that ugliness will destroy it.

For my part, I feel deeply that the fate of humankind, and its dignity, are at stake whenever our natural splendours—oceans, forests or elephants—are threatened with destruction.

Remaining human sometimes seems a rather overwhelming task; and yet, on our gruelling journey into the unknown, we must shoulder an additional burden: that of the elephants.

There is no doubt that, in the name of absolute rationalism, you would have to be destroyed, so that we might occupy all the space on this overpopulated planet.
Nor is there any doubt that your disappearance would mark the beginning of a world made entirely for man.

But let me tell you this, my old friend: in a world entirely made for man, there might well be no place for man either. All that will remain of us will be robots. We shall never succeed in making ourselves entirely our own creation.

We are forever condemned to depend on a mystery that neither logic nor imagination can penetrate, and your presence amongst us evokes a creative power that cannot be accounted for in scientific or rational terms, but only in terms that encompass meaning, hope and nostalgia. You are our last innocence.

I am only too well aware that by taking your side – but is it not simply my own? – I will inevitably be labelled a conservative, or even a reactionary, a ‘monster’ belonging to another, prehistoric era: that of liberalism.

I gladly accept this label at a time when the new intellectual guide of French youth, the philosopher Michel Foucault, proclaims that it is not only God who is dead and gone forever, but Man himself, Man and Humanism.

And so, dearest mister elephant, here we are, you and I, in the same boat, swept towards oblivion by the same powerful wind of absolute rationalism. In a truly materialistic and realistic society, poets, writers, artists, dreamers and elephants are nothing more than nuisances.

I remember an old chant sung by the canoeists of the Chari River in Central Africa.

‘We shall kill the great elephant

We shall eat the great elephant

We shall enter his belly

And eat his heart and his liver…’

Believe me, your most devoted friend.

Romain Gary
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Translated from French by Eponine Howarth.