A Safer Way To Be "One With the Tiger"
October 1, 2012 | Viveca |
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'God created the cat so that mankind may know the pleasure of caressing the tiger' Fernand Mery
In recent news, a young man lept into the tiger's pen at the Bronx zoo, home to Bashuta, a 400 lb Siberian tiger. He approached the great cat and began to tenderly stroke it. As he was rushed to hospital, he explained: "I wanted to be one with the tiger." Being eaten is one way to do that. Whatever this poor soul was thinking, the fact remains - tigers capture our imagination. Indeed, their beauty, danger and power infuses legends, poetry, art, and literature with stripey splendour. From William Blake's "Tyger" to Kipling's Shere Khan, this animal has burned bright in some of the best reads ever:
- The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
- The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- I Am An Executioner: Love Stories by Rajesh Parameswaran
- The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant
- Tigers in Red Weather by Ruth Padel
- The Essential Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. (Best. Tiger. Ever.)
- The Tiger's Curse by Colleen Houck. First in a great teen series.
Left to right: Shere Khan from Disney's The Jungle Book (voiced by the incomparable George Sanders), Tony the Tiger (Kellogg's gggrreat spokestiger since 1951), A. A. Milne's Tigger (via Disney), and Calvin and Hobbs, a brilliant comic strip which ran from 1985-1995.
Watch the trailer for Ang Lee's soon-to-be-released Life of Pi. Martel likes what Lee did with his Booker Prize-winning novel.
This is kind of creepy, but here is a creative clip of Blake "reading" his poem, The Tyger.
William Blake's The Tyger from Songs of Innocence and of Experience
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