Life of Pi Part 1, Chapter 1 Quotes
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?