Half a Soul

“And I will not let you die. You once told me that your cousin was a warm lantern to you, Dora. I know what you mean by that now. Of all things, you have become my lantern too—and I cannot bring myself to let you go out.”

“I did not come here only to dance. I came here only to dance with you. It is quite a different thing.”

There is an apocryphal story about fishes on the beach that has stayed with me my entire life. I do not remember where I first heard it, but I have always been able to recall it to mind with absolute clarity. It goes like this:

A great number of fish had washed up on the beach; there, they flip-flopped, gasping for breath. A little girl had taken it upon herself to walk up and down the beach, however, picking up fishes and throwing them back into the ocean. A bystander marvelled at this, and headed out to talk with her.

“Why are you throwing these fish back into the ocean?” he asked the little girl. “It won’t even matter, in the end. There are so many of them! You cannot possibly hope to save them all!”

The little girl frowned at the bystander and held up the fish that she currently had in her hands. “It matters to this fish,” she told him. And then, she turned herself back down the beach and stubbornly continued throwing fish back into the ocean.