Golden Gate Park

Golden Gate Park provides the setting for a zoo visit that brings Mike’s concern for captive animals into contact with a painful recognition of human behavior. Among the exhibits, Jill’s changing response to the animals and Mike’s careful attention to the zoo’s purposes frame a scene in which a small capuchin’s retaliation sparks Mike’s uncontrollable laughter.

Setting and the Zoo

The visit takes place on a cold, windy day in Golden Gate Park. Mike does not notice the weather; Jill, who has learned that she need not remain uncomfortable if she does not wish to, nevertheless welcomes the warmth of the monkey house. She dislikes its inmates not because their public behavior offends her former reserve, but because the monkeys and apes seem too much like people. Their expressions and actions recall to her what she dislikes about her own species.

Jill’s preferences elsewhere in the zoo are different. She likes the Lion House: the male lions’ confidence despite captivity, the females’ maternal composure, the Bengal tigers’ beauty, and the smaller leopards. Mike generally shares her interest in other exhibits, spending long stretches at the Aviary, the Reptile House, and the seals. He once judged that, if a creature had to hatch on Earth, becoming a sea lion would be especially good.

Mike’s Understanding of Captivity

Mike’s attention to zoos has a history. On his first visit, he was distressed enough to be ready to remove the barriers and release every animal. Jill told him to wait and understand before acting. She explained that the animals might not survive if released into the climate and surroundings he had in mind, and that a zoo could function as a kind of nest. After hours of withdrawal, Mike accepted the explanation and did not again threaten to remove the bars, glass, and grilles.

His understanding became more specific: he came to recognize that the barriers were also intended to keep people away from the animals, not merely to confine the animals. From then on, he made a point of visiting zoos wherever he traveled. In Golden Gate Park, that developed practice sets the scene: he is no longer responding only to captivity as a problem to be immediately undone, but observing what animals do within their shared enclosure.

The Capuchins and the Turning Point

On this visit, even the camels fail to lift Mike’s mood, and the monkeys do not cheer him. He and Jill watch a family of capuchins eating, resting, grooming, courting, and moving around their cage. Jill secretly tosses peanuts to them despite the posted prohibition. When one medium-sized monkey reaches a peanut, a much larger male takes it and beats him before leaving.

The smaller monkey does not follow its aggressor. It stays where it was, pounds its knuckles on the concrete, and chatters in frustration. Mike watches solemnly. Then the slighted animal abruptly attacks a still smaller monkey, knocking it down and beating it more severely than it had been beaten. Afterward it appears relaxed. Its victim retreats, whimpering, and finds refuge beside a female carrying a baby; the other monkeys take no notice.

Mike throws back his head and laughs. The laughter becomes loud and uncontrollable: he gasps, tears come to his eyes, and he trembles and begins to sink toward the floor. Jill tells him to stop, but although he ceases folding himself up, the laughter and tears continue. A zoo attendant hurries over to ask Jill whether she needs help.

Significance of the Visit

The episode connects Mike’s earlier impulse to free the animals with his more developed ability to wait and observe. The cage remains a place of confinement, but it is also a setting in which Mike can watch behavior that resists an easy moral division between victim and aggressor: the monkey that suffers at one animal’s hands passes the violence onward to a weaker one. Jill’s secret feeding and the animals’ largely indifferent responses keep the scene grounded in the imperfect conditions of the enclosure rather than turning it into a simple rescue narrative.

For Jill, the zoo also registers a change in how she regards physical life. The monkeys no longer provoke the same fastidious repugnance, but their likeness to humans remains troubling. Mike’s laughter marks the visit’s decisive change of tone: he moves from solemn observation to a bodily response so strong that it alarms Jill and brings the attendant running. Golden Gate Park thus becomes the setting for a moment in which an ordinary animal encounter opens onto Mike’s developing understanding of humanity.