Lizards

Lizards appear in a brief but pivotal encounter in the narrator’s memoir: in 1951, two small white lizards approach him in a New Mexico desert, and one comes close to his face and ear. Their unafraid presence awakens an almost overwhelming hope for communication, though no message follows. The episode holds together the narrator’s longing for connection and his conviction that animals deserve human protection.

The Desert Encounter

The narrator is sitting on a block of lava in the New Mexico desert when two little, entirely white lizards begin climbing over him. They explore his person with complete assurance and without fear. One calmly presses its front feet against his face, brings its muzzle close to his ear, and stays there for several moments. The encounter is intimate, but the account gives the animals no words or human intentions: the narrator waits, and hears nothing.

Hope and Silence

The lizards’ approach makes the narrator’s whole body tense with the expectation that something might be communicated. He describes the hope as fervent and almost violent, yet explicitly rejects the idea that he is awaiting an explanation or believes in reincarnation. The moment’s force lies in the gap between the closeness of the animal and the absence of any decipherable message. The narrator reflects that humans are entirely visible to the creatures they love, while what animals see in human beings remains unknowable to him.

Connection to Care for Nature

The encounter belongs to a wider account of the narrator’s postwar sensitivity to animal life. He recalls being so ill that he feared harming an ant by walking or watching a bug drown, and says that he later wrote a large book urging people to take responsibility for protecting nature. The lizards do not deliver a stated lesson or explanation; instead, their calm approach gives concrete shape to the hope and vulnerability that inform this concern. They remain creatures encountered on their own terms, even as their silence becomes part of the narrator’s reflection on human limits and care.