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The protagonist of “Plautus: A Memoir of My Years on Earth and Last Days in Space,” Plautus is a Russian tortoise. She’s thoughtful, perceptive, and is very concerned with ensuring her own safety. Thus, she’s concerned when her first owner, the hermit Oleg, begins trying to predict the future by breaking tortoise shells—and she chooses to leave him when he embraces Christianity, which she’s heard associates tortoises with sin. Plautus lives with a number of famous writers throughout her long life. She leaves Oleg initially in the hopes of becoming Leo Tolstoy’s tortoise, but is disappointed to discover he’s already dead. However, her years with his daughter, Alexandra, introduce Plautus to a new way of thinking. At this point, she begins to consider solitude, and what it means for a person (or tortoise) to choose to be alone. She finds Alexandra, who chooses to be by herself, an inspiration. From her next owner, Virginia Woolf, Plautus learns to appreciate the human-animal relationship more. Woolf is a kind owner to her and is distraught when Plautus first arrives at Woolf’s house with an infection due to having Tolstoy’s last words carved into her shell. Fortunately for Plautus, though, the carving does help her survive in the years after Woolf’s death. While living with George Orwell, Plautus first learns about space and decides she’d like to go there. After more than a decade of trying, Plautus finally gets herself into the Dr. Yazdovsky’s Soviet labs that put animals in space. Plautus spends several years studying to go to space, during which she interviews any animals that do survive their trips to space for insights. Plautus is so interested in going to space that she doesn’t question why people send animals to space knowing they’ll die—in her mind, it’s an honor. So Plautus is thrilled when she’s slated to be the first animal to orbit the moon. She dies after several days in space, believing that there, she’s going to finally understand what it means to be totally alone.
Plautus Quotes in Only the Animals
The Only the Animals quotes below are all either spoken by Plautus or refer to Plautus. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Plautus: A Memoir of My Years on Earth and Last Days in Space: Soul of Tortoise
Quotes
And with a glance at me—a kind of tribute, I’d like to think—she would read out my favorite paragraph of the whole book, a moment that does justice to both the poet Elizabeth and her dog Flush by showing them as equals in their inability to ever fully understand each other: not so different then, from a biographer trying to get into the skin of her subject.
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The Soviets were sending animals into space like there was no tomorrow (which, for the animals, there mostly wasn’t), desperate to finalise their research on the viability of manned space flight and the effects on living creatures of prolonged weightlessness and radiation from the Van Allen belts, and get a man on the moon before the Americans. They’d heard rumors that the Americans had sent a bunch of black mice into space and the cosmic rays had turned them grey; this would be undesirable in humans.
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But there is mechanical trouble while he’s up there and instead of getting sips of water or tablets, he starts getting zapped by the electric pads wired to the soles of his feet. He gets back to earth, gets out of the capsule and the NASA guys are smiling, holding his hands, but Enos is fucking mad. This used to make me laugh. But up in space, I just had to think about this, about Enos getting buzzed on his feet for doing the right thing—the right thing! what he’s been trained to do!—and I wanted to bite somebody’s face off.
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Get the entire Only the Animals LitChart as a printable PDF.
Plautus Quotes in Only the Animals
The Only the Animals quotes below are all either spoken by Plautus or refer to Plautus. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Plautus: A Memoir of My Years on Earth and Last Days in Space: Soul of Tortoise
Quotes
And with a glance at me—a kind of tribute, I’d like to think—she would read out my favorite paragraph of the whole book, a moment that does justice to both the poet Elizabeth and her dog Flush by showing them as equals in their inability to ever fully understand each other: not so different then, from a biographer trying to get into the skin of her subject.
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
The Soviets were sending animals into space like there was no tomorrow (which, for the animals, there mostly wasn’t), desperate to finalise their research on the viability of manned space flight and the effects on living creatures of prolonged weightlessness and radiation from the Van Allen belts, and get a man on the moon before the Americans. They’d heard rumors that the Americans had sent a bunch of black mice into space and the cosmic rays had turned them grey; this would be undesirable in humans.
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
But there is mechanical trouble while he’s up there and instead of getting sips of water or tablets, he starts getting zapped by the electric pads wired to the soles of his feet. He gets back to earth, gets out of the capsule and the NASA guys are smiling, holding his hands, but Enos is fucking mad. This used to make me laugh. But up in space, I just had to think about this, about Enos getting buzzed on his feet for doing the right thing—the right thing! what he’s been trained to do!—and I wanted to bite somebody’s face off.
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