William Slothrop & the slave driver

[Steve Maas]

William admires the pigs, enjoys their company, treats them well. When all 
is said and done, he sells them for slaughter. Which would count more if 
weighed against a feather, ma'at style?

     Steve Maas

Bandwraith:
>[…]The Driver has no interest in maintaining a
>long term relationship with the "perishables" and
>seeks only to drive them to market and turn a profit.[…]

Copied from HyperArts (from GR 555):
"[William Slothrop] and his son John got a pig operation going--used to 
drive hogs right back down the great escarpment, back over the long pike to 
Boston, drive them just like sheep or cows. By the time they got to market 
those hogs were so skinny it was hardly worth it, but William wasn't really 
in it so much for the money as just for the trip itself. He enjoyed the road 
[...] --and most of all just being with those pigs. They were good company. 
Despite the folklore and the injunctions in his own Bible, William came to 
love their nobility and personal freedom, their gift for finding comfort in 
the mud on a hot day--pigs out on the road, in company together, were 
everything Boston wasn't, and you can imagine what the end of the journey, 
the weighing, slaughter and dreary pigless return back up into the hills 
must've been like for William."

"William must've been waiting for the one pig that wouldn't die, that would 
validate all the ones who'd had to, all his Gadarene swine who'd rushed into 
extinction like lemmings, possessed not by demons but by trust for men, 
which the men kept betraying...possessed by innocence they couldn't 
lose...by faith in William as another variety of pig, at home with the 
Earth, sharing the same gift of life...."


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