It’s Friday, and short stories are a treat to read over a weekend with a pint or a cup of coffee. So here’s one for such a time. “Leiningen and the Ants” by Carl Stephenson, originally in German, is a story of intrepid individualism and faith in man’s ability, as well as a rebuke against pride. Most of all, it’s fun to read. A precursor of sorts to zombie novels — this one features an implacable horde of ants against a man and his wits.
Stephenson writes:
[“]Unless they alter their course and there’s no reason why they should, they’ll reach your plantation in two days at the latest.”
Leiningen sucked placidly at a cigar about the size of a corncob and for a few seconds gazed without answering at the agitated District Commissioner. Then he took the cigar from his lips, and leaned slightly forward. With his bristling grey hair, bulky nose, and lucid eyes, he had the look of an aging and shabby eagle.
“Decent of you,” he murmured, “paddling all this way just to give me the tip. But you’re pulling my leg of course when you say I must do a bunk. Why, even a herd of saurians couldn’t drive me from this plantation of mine.”
The Brazilian official threw up lean and lanky arms and clawed the air with wildly distended fingers. “Leiningen!” he shouted. “You’re insane! They’re not creatures you can fight—they’re an elemental—an ‘act of God!’ Ten miles long, two miles wide—ants, nothing but ants! And every single one of them a fiend from hell; before you can spit three times they’ll eat a full-grown buffalo to the bones. I tell you if you don’t clear out at once there’ll he nothing left of you but a skeleton picked as clean as your own plantation.”
Leiningen grinned. “Act of God, my eye! Anyway, I’m not an old woman; I’m not going to run for it just because an elemental’s on the way. And don’t think I’m the kind of fathead who tries to fend off lightning with his fists either. I use my intelligence, old man. With me, the brain isn’t a second blindgut; I know what it’s there for. When I began this model farm and plantation three years ago, I took into account all that could conceivably happen to it. And now I’m ready for anything and everything—including your ants.”
The Brazilian rose heavily to his feet. “I’ve done my best,” he gasped. “Your obstinacy endangers not only yourself, but the lives of your four hundred workers. You don’t know these ants!”
Leiningen accompanied him down to the river, where the Government launch was moored. The vessel cast off. As it moved downstream, the exclamation mark neared the rail and began waving its arms frantically. Long after the launch had disappeared round the bend, Leiningen thought he could still hear that dimming imploring voice, “You don’t know them, I tell you! You don’t know them!”
(You can find the rest here.)
I’m sometimes asked why I’m a conservative or what conservatism is. I reckon conservatism is to hope in tomorrow while going about the business of today and carrying the best of that which has come before with gratitude. We preserve the traditions of our forebears because we find them Good (in the platonic sense), and we stock the larder so that our children may eat a meal we’ll never live to know. It’s a story and philosophy of self-governance, independent of mortal governance, and does not naturally mesh with the state in the way many leftist ideologies do.
The nice thing about being a conservative is that one needs none other than oneself, some gumption, and moral direction to have hope that our world a fortnight hence can be better than it is today.
That’s what I take from Leiningen, that for all our faults, humans are — with the exception of God (an infinite exception, granted) — unsurpassed in their ability to shape the world. When others bemoan that we’ll find our end in climate change, nuclear war, or whatever else, all I hear is defeatism — a deeply unconservative nothingness. It’s far braver, and more likely to be true, that we will survive, and we really ought to continue bearing the Good with us when we do.
Or maybe it’s just a story about ants in one’s pants.