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Letters From The Earth, Letter 5: Gotta Catch 'Em All, Old Testament Style! • The Devil’s Details • Episode 717

Letters From The Earth, Letter 5: Gotta Catch ‘Em All, Old Testament Style!

Letter Five is Noah’s collecting problem, worked out with actual receipts. Satan sets up the comparison first: a Roman named Symmachus once sent men across Asia and Africa to gather wild animals for the arena, and it took three years and four and a half million dollars — for under five thousand animals, all of them quadrupeds and alligators, no birds or snakes or insects. Noah’s contract was a hundred and forty-six thousand kinds of creatures plus upwards of two million species of insects. Satan’s conclusion: Noah gave up. He gathered what he had room for and stopped. If he’d known the requirements at the start he’d have known he needed a fleet of arks, but he didn’t know how many kinds of creatures existed, and neither did his Chief.

Which is why there’s no kangaroo, no possum, no gila monster, and no ornithorhyncus. They only escaped drowning by accident — there wasn’t water enough to go around, only enough to flood one small corner of the globe, the rest of the world being unknown and therefore presumed not to exist.

The centerpiece is the stranger who shows up with news: six hundred miles off he watched a billowy black sea of strange animal life coming up a valley. Sloths as big as elephants. Frogs as big as a cow. A megatherium and his harem. Saurians and saurians and saurians, a hundred feet long and twice as quarrelsome. They’d heard about the Ark and they were coming — all of them, hungry, and they wouldn’t care a rap for the regulations. This is what finally decides Noah to stop and let the rest go extinct.

He’d have sailed at once, but the decorators of the housefly’s drawing room still had finishing touches to put on. Another day went to loading sixty-eight billion flies, the Deity still afraid there might not be enough. Another to stowing forty tons of selected filth for their sustenance. Then he sailed, and the Ark was just sinking out of sight when the monsters arrived and added their lamentations to those of the frightened children clinging to the rocks in the rain, praying to an all-pitying being who had never answered a prayer in his life.

The Devil is in the details. 
Join Lester Ryan Clark and Kynan Dias for a comedic deep dive into the history of the ultimate villain, tracking his journey through theology, Paradise Lost, and modern cinema.”