Why the Bear Is the Best Animal

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The bear’s life is similar to that of many other animals. Long immersed in an ecosystem whose rhythms have become frantic, shaped by collective migrations and individual needs, he drags himself wearily between den and work, following the one true doctrine: make money. He does not enjoy chasing this money. He hates work. He could, not metaphorically, gut all his colleagues, but he doesn’t: he’s been to therapy, he’s a better animal now.

For some time now, in the evenings, the bear has been reading serious nonfiction, books of philosophy. After a day at the office, though, he is always tired, suspended somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. In the morning he cannot remember the concepts, but he knows he has come across at least one that might help him fight his monumental laziness, his vast procrastination, his chronic sleepiness. He seems to remember this: no creature escapes its own nature. The ant works, the spider weaves, the sparrow flies off at dawn to take care of its little business.

He thinks it over. Bullshit.

He drags himself out of bed with difficulty — his weight is considerable — scratches his hairy back against the rough wall, and goes to the toilet. In therapy he has learned two useful things: no phone as soon as he wakes up, no phone in the bathroom. He has discovered that, by doing this, he can vaguely visualize the dreams he had during the night. It is a beautiful moment — at the office he gets exactly five minutes by the clock — in which he feels a deep connection with his inner self. He concentrates as though he were doing something very important, and not simply taking a shit.

He is an animal prone to nostalgia: often, walking down the street, certain sensations return to him when his nose catches notes of forest fruit from a café, or a particular smell of grass from some park, and he relives the times when he gnawed on logs under the spring sun. That night, in fact, he dreamed precisely of those scenes: a female bear, a great erection, the faded memory of that partner, his arrival in the city, then the wild life of when he was a cub, shits with a lake view in the clearing just outside the thick woods, the outlines of blue mountains, the hum of insects and the blinding light, the scent of juniper berries, his mother always watchful, hibernation.

Today no animal hibernates anymore, but once, he had been told, bears used to do it. They closed up shop. They slipped underground, comfortable, in the dark, resting for whole months, and without guilt. The bear remembers these stories with a certain melancholy, and a touch of anger. He flushes, washes his ass, gets dressed, and goes to work.

An animal so majestic, with such an excellent sense of smell, such extraordinary strength and agility, looks almost absurd forced into a cardigan and a tight shirt, an eco-leather backpack, uncomfortable shoes, perched on a swivel chair and hunched over a desk.

The macaque, his long-time colleague, is unbearable. He lets others finish their sentences while already forming a reply that, in most cases, has nothing to do with what was just said. He claps people on the back and uses the word “vision” at least once a day.

The weekly meeting is coming to an end. The bear is anxious about his presentation. Is his shirt wrinkled? Last slide: the report results. All done. Silence for a few seconds, then the macaque:

“I think we need to dare more. Think outside the box… at least, that’s what I think!”

The boss nods with satisfaction and writes something down in his notebook. The meeting ends and they go to get a coffee. In front of the machine, the macaque gives him a pat and begins:

“So, how’s it going? All good?”

“Good.”

“Good good, or so-so?”

“Good.”

Then the macaque starts telling him something that happened the night before, a dinner with important people in the banking sector.

The bear puts the book down on his bedside table. He is sure of it: many animals never think about the fact that we live on a giant ball of rock and water and mud which, suspended in infinite space, spins on itself in the tomb-like silence of the polka-dotted dark. Many animals do not look at the stars. They keep their heads lowered, grazing, typing numbers into spreadsheets, counting the hairs around their navels.

Before falling asleep, he thinks for a moment of the open sea, and feels envy for the fish who live so nicely underwater, with their societies, their affairs, their hidden and secret currents, a silent submerged world. Who knows what fish dream about, he wonders, whether they too struggle to fall asleep, and whether every now and then they surface to contemplate the midnight-blue sky. Beneath his thoughts, the coming and going of the cars outside sounds like waves.

The next day, at work, during the coffee break, the bear confides to the macaque that he intends to leave his job in order to devote himself, body and soul, to the search for himself. The macaque does not seem surprised. He smiles at him and says:

“I just think that a job like this, in six or twelve months, for example, you won’t find again that easily! How would you explain the gap on your CV to recruiters?”

GaponyourCVtorecruiters?

Something snaps.

Suddenly the bear rediscovers his dormant strength. He remembers his claws, his fangs, his untamable spirit, and regresses completely to a primitive state. First of all, he tears the fucking macaque to pieces. He destroys his own computer station while the entire animal kingdom starts fleeing through the office. What happens in the following minutes is later reconstructed by the survivors with the uncertainty typical of collective trauma: some remember the beaver flying, the rooster flattened against the carpet, the prairie dog wedged between the bear’s jaws.

He visualizes the objective: the Animal Resources office. As he makes his way forward, he overturns desks, the papers from the folders make circles in the air, the bear drools and smashes everything. The bosses shit themselves. There is a smell of shit, of nature, finally. From the street, passersby glimpse this enormous furious animal through the glass walls. In a mute roar that resembles a booming yawn, the bear savors the great hibernation to come.

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Why the Bear Is the Best Animal