Here’s what I wrote; I had to cut it short on account of the cooking I have/had to do for a family gathering over the weekend:
So, the first thing that’s popping into my head is wolf. A few years ago, in the cabin in which I’ll be spending the weekend, my cousin confessed his morbid fear of wolves. This struck me as odd, and although many would say that the fear of wolves is quite rational, I beg to differ. The way I see it, wolves are the perfect semblance of us humans and our eccentricities. A wolf’s very existence relies on the death of so many others, and though the majority of us need not kill to thrive, we do so in a metaphorical sense, stepping on the backs those around us just to get where we are and where we hope to be. Just as they are always living at the expense of another, we too derive our happiness and success from someone else’s misfortune. Like wolves, we’re queerly (forgive my spelling) hypocritical about our social stuctures and relationships. We WANT people as part of our groups, units, societies, claiming it is the betterment of everyone, and yet we shun and cast off “undesireables” just like the pack. Like wolves, we depend on eachother so much, and yet allow our pride, prejudice and misjudgement to result in our counterproductivity. Though I don’t know how reliable my source is, I remember reading in Jack London’s White Fang that the titular wolf, upon returning to his mother after a few weeks, is completely forgotten to her, and is even attacked when he approaches her newest litter. If this an actual behavioral trait among wolves,we have even more in common, since we as people overeagerly try to discard our pasts and the innermost building blocks of who we are. The more I ponder my cousin’s fear, the more it seems to hit me: maybe our fear doesn’t lie in the alien, the unknown or the intrinsically different, maybe it lies in that which we find most familiar; the things we keep most abreast, since they are the greatest likeness to us as people and the things we’d like to ignore. Perhaps this fear is rooted in a fear of ourselves, both as indviduals and as a collective; perhaps it is not the wolf’s claws or fangs that frighten us, but what that wolf could potentially reflect, and what truths it could unearth under greater scrutiny.