uP tHe eVoLuTioN!
So there I was, reading "The Song of the Dodo" by David Quammen, and found what may be
the single most illuminating thought I have ever encountered: "What motivated the Dutch is
anyone's guess. Maybe they themselves had a secret monkey-eating vice."
Well, it sure would explain a whole heck of a lot.
[On Charles Darwin]
"He was observant. He was gentle but firm. He was smart.
And he wasn't afraid to look like a lunatic."
(David Quammen, "The Song of the Dodo")
"I'm not completely insane,
maybe just a little bit crazy.
There's no one to blame,
got no shame 'bout my game,
don't want nobody to save me."
(Alana Davis, "Crazy")
"The mere idea of even attempting to account for ourselves defeated us.
We settled instead for explaining, by means of elaborate mime and sign
language, that we were barking mad. This worked."
(Douglas Adams, "Last Chance to See")
"Seems like only yesterday
I left my mind behind,
down in the gypsy cafe
with a friend of a friend of mine."
(Bob Dylan, "Love is Just a Four-Letter Word)
"I'm not the hang-around kind,
I've got a fugitive mind.
Can't wrap me up in your chains,
'been nice to know you' is my middle name.
I'm insatiable as a shark,
I've been known to prowl in the dark.
But I've been changing my ways;
you make it easy for me to stay."
(Kristen Hall, "Too Long Running")
"I could never tell if it was Opportunity or the Wolf knocking."
(Anne Ellis, "The Life of an Ordinary Woman")
"I have a tendency to wear my mind on my sleeve.
I have a history of losing my shirt."
(Barenaked Ladies, "One Week")
"I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."
(Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself")
"Here on earth I'll have my cake,
gonna eat it too, make no mistake.
'Cause if it's a question of to be or not to be
I'll put my boots on and go see what I can see"
(Crash Test Dummies, "Here On Earth")
"You should expect to get wet, or at least dirty."
(David Kesler)
"Wilderness begins in the human mind."
(Edward Abbey)
"To look into the eyes of such a life, a familiar one in its animal beauty, yet so mysterious
and so much a separate entity, and to have those eyes look back is an experience that has moved
me since I first caught a turtle . . . That was many years ago, in a time long lost to me and a swamp that has long since disappeared
under blacktop. I was eight years old and thought swamps were forever."
(David M. Carroll, "The Year of the Turtle")
"Ironically, it is often not the big and beautiful creatures, but the ugly
and less dramatic ones, that we need most. . . .while Nature has considerable
resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. The
darker it gets, the faster we're driving."
(Douglas Adams, "Last Chance to See")
"Here we are, practically speaking twenty-first-century mankind, filled to exuberance with
our new understanding of kinship to all the family of life, and here we are, still
nineteenth-century man, walking boot-shod over the open face of nature, subjugating and
civilizing it. And we cannot stop this controlling, unless we vanish under the hill ourselves.
If there were such a thing as a world mind, it should crack over this. . . .The earth risks
being eutrophied by us."
(Lewis Thomas, "The Lives of a Cell")
"If a rock gets thrown
the glass will shatter,
listen to the sound.
We're playing with matches,
playing with fire,
playing with the earth for our own desires."
(Carrie Newcomer, "Playing With Matches")
"For this world that we have made, none of us is bad enough.
For the world that made us, none is good enough."
(Edward Abbey)
"A life is a moment in a season.
A life is one snowfall.
A life is one autumn day.
A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door's shadow.
A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs."
(Alan Lightman, "Einstein's Dreams")
"We've got these chains hanging around our necks;
people want to strangle us with them
before we take our first breath.
Afraid of change, afraid of staying the same,
when temptation calls we just look away."
(Barenaked Ladies, "What a Good Boy")
"But way back where I come from, we never mean to bother;
we don't like to make our passions other people's concern.
And we walk in the world of safe people,
and at night we walk into our houses and burn."
(Dar Williams, "Iowa")
"I went down to Memphis
but I could not find no peace;
my soul is feeling restless
and I need some relief. . .
Take me down, to the levee where the women sing.
Lay me down, like an angel with a broken wing."
(Jonny Lang, "The Levee")
"They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars -- on stars, where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places."
(Robert Frost, "Desert Places")
[On the voice of the Loon]
"Wild maniacal laughter,
also a mournful yodel.
Often calls at night."
(Audubon Society Nature Guides, "Wetlands")
"In shadows and in moonlight, bluets shine like distant stars."
(David M. Carroll, "The Year of the Turtle")
[On the behavior of the American Bittern]
"When an observer is nearby
it will often raise its head,
point its bill skyward, and
sway slowly from side to side,
as if imitating waving reeds."
(Audubon Society Nature Guides, "Wetlands")
"The dizzy sensation we experience when standing in high places is not simply a fear of
falling. It's often the case that the only thing likely to make us fall is the actual
dizziness itself, so it is, at best, an extremely irrational, even self-fulfilling fear.
However, in the distant past of our evolutionary journey toward our current state, we lived
in trees. We leapt from tree to tree. In which case, there may be some part of our mind
that, when confronted with a void, expects to be able to leap out into it and even urges us
to do so. So what you end up with is a conflict between a primitive, atavistic part of your
mind which is saying, 'Jump!' and the more modern, rational part of your mind which is saying,
'For Christ's sake, don't!'"
(Douglas Adams, "Last Chance to See")
"I believe I can fly
I believe I can touch the sky
I think about it every night and day
Spread my wings and fly away."
(R. Kelly, "I Believe I Can Fly")
"Once all Africans could fly like birds; but owing to their many transgressions,
their wings were taken away. There remained, here and there, in the sea islands
and out-of-the-way places in the low country, some who had been overlooked, and
had retained the power of flight, though they looked like other men."
(Arna Bontemps & Langston Hughes, "The Book of Negro Folklore")
"White wings, they never grow weary,
They carry me swiftly over the sea;
Night comes and I long for my dearie,
I'll spread out my white wings and sail home to thee."
(Folk song of Irish immigrants in the 1800s)
"Well, I don't dare close my eyes and I don't dare wink.
Maybe in the next life I'll be able to hear myself think.
Feel like talking to somebody but I just don't know who.
Well, I'm trying to get closer
but I'm still a million miles from you."
(Bob Dylan, "Million Miles")
"Life is unfair. And it's not fair that life is unfair."
(Edward Abbey)
"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision,
then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."
(Audre Lorde)
"I'm not being radical when I kiss you
and I don't love you to make a point.
It's the hollow of my heart that cries when I miss you
and keeps me alive when we're apart."
(Catie Curtis, "Radical")
"I spent most of my life trying to wear another man's clothes:
the collars too tight, and the shoes they hurt my sole.
I got a closet full of nightmares in the style of everybody's dream,
but nothing seems to fit me anymore -- I fall apart at the seams.
Oh whoa oh oh oh.
There's a blackbird calling me up from the highest tree;
she says, if you don't like the way things are going,
come fly away with me."
(Darden Smith, "Fall Apart at the Seams")
[Two of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"]
IX.
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
XII.
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying."
(Wallace Stevens)
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