The Llama Explains His Absence.

It might have been noted by regular visitors that my friend the llama has been absent from these pages for a long time. (Mel is particularly disappointed because she very much enjoys my conversations with the old boy. But llamas are their own people and I have no right to attempt any invocation of his company.) Well, today I saw him again.

I was standing at the entrance to the Harry Potter wood at the top of my lane, leaning on the gate and offering my respects to its inhabitants, when I saw him standing on the bend in the track which winds downhill. He was staring at me with an impassive impression, but said nothing.

‘Hello,’ I said, ‘why have you been away so long? Have you been busy or something?’

He continued to stare for a few seconds, and then spoke. Although he was some distance away I heard his voice as clearly as ever.

‘Since you ask two questions with the same breath, reason will be best served if I choose to answer the first one first. Not only would that be arithmetically appropriate, it would also render the second redundant.’

‘You haven’t changed much, have you?’ I replied.

‘’Why should I change? What purpose would it serve? And neither have you, come to that. You are rather given to the habit of asking redundant questions.’

I smiled and continued:

‘Very well, so what’s the answer to the first?

‘In order to answer the first I must correct a misapprehension. I have visited you several times, but you didn’t see me because your mind was filled with two considerations which are vexatious to my spirit.’

‘Which were?’

‘The brevity of the human lifespan and the question of whether anything matters.’

‘They seem perfectly reasonable considerations to me. Why do they trouble you?’

‘They don’t exactly trouble me in the sense that the word is habitually used; what they do is irritate my indefatigable capacity for reason.’

‘But why?’

‘“But why?” he asks. “Why?” Very well: to take the first one first. All physical creatures in your world have a lifespan. What does it matter whether that span is ten years, a hundred years, or a thousand years? There is birth; there is a period of life; and there is death. You’ve known that for as long as you’ve been here, so why should it be of any more of concern now than it was when you were young? As for whether anything matters, the human animal is not equipped to know whether anything matters. You have books; you have religious traditions; you have teachers (I believe you call them gurus in the hope that it will somehow endow them with infallible credibility); you have philosophers. You can choose to take any one of them and believe what they tell you if you like. But none of them actually know whether anything matters, and neither do you, so why waste time wondering about the answer to the unanswerable?’

‘Because human beings are made to wonder, I suppose.’

‘I know they are. I consider it to be one of their worst – or at least most pointless and therefore irrational – failings.’

‘I see. Oh well, reason was ever your strong suit. So have you given up on me now?’

‘Not necessarily. I’m watching and waiting to see whether you change. I might be back, or I might not. Goodbye.’

With that he turned and walked away, around the bend and out of sight. Wishing to say a few last words, I unfastened the gate and hurried after him. When I reached the point on the bend where he’d been standing, I looked down the long straight track running through the wood and he was nowhere to be seen. Llamas are much in the habit of doing that sort of thing.