Life of Pi Part 1, Chapter 1 Quotes
How we cite the quotes:
Citations follow this format: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote 1
I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at sloths in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of my scientific probing. (1.1.7)
Pi often sees a deep spirituality in the animal world. At one point, Pi compares Richard Parker to a yogi (see Themes: Man and Natural World 2.61.19). It's the calm and engagement of sloths and tigers that Pi admires. Even though science leads Pi to these discoveries, it doesn't quite explain them. Pi needs religion and imagination to usher him into the spiritual lives of other beings.
Quote 2
My majors were religious studies and zoology. My fourth-year thesis for religious studies concerned certain aspects of the cosmogony theory of Isaac Luria, the great sixteenth-century Kabbalist from Safed. My zoology thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth. I chose the sloth because its demeanor – calm, quiet and introspective – did something to soothe my shattered self. (1.1.2)
Martel couldn't mix science and religion any more conspicuously: "My majors were religious studies and zoology." But he does subtly intermingle the two in the sentences that follow. Isaac Luria is a mystic but he's also obsessed with how the universe began, which happens to be a scientific endeavor. The thyroid glands of three-toed sloths clearly sounds like zoology. The demeanor of the sloth, however, adds spiritual interest. Pi can't stay away from religion. He also can't stay away from science.
Quote 3
I never had problems with my fellow scientists. Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science. (1.1.9)
Pi has just criticized his fellow religious-studies students for being "muddled agnostics" and "in the thrall of reason." Here he praises his fellow scientists. Does Pi consider science a type of faith? What is it that he admires about his scientist friends? And why does he have such a distaste for agnosticism?
Quote 4
My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition. I mock this skull. I look at it and I say, "You've got the wrong fellow. You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!" (1.1.11)
A "memento mori" is an object – such as a skull – used to remind us of death. We know, we know: European art can be so gloomy. Here Pi says his own life has become a memento mori painting. Meaning, the events of his life only seem to remind him of death. But Pi doesn't stop there. True to form, Pi mocks his memento mori and says he doesn't "believe in death." Can you blame him? He survived for 227 days on the ocean. Death be not proud and all that.
Quote 5
Richard Parker has stayed with me. I've never forgotten him. Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart. (1.1.14)
Stockholm Syndrome anyone? While it's probably reductive to say Pi has fallen head over heels in love with his captor, Pi's admission does lay bare the "strangeness of the human heart." Is it some type of madness to love the creature who, at any point during your harrowing 227 days together on a lifeboat, might have mauled you to death? Pi could respond: and so it goes with God. We duly note here that Richard Parker did not maul Pi. Nonetheless, "nightmares tinged with love" border on madness.