Words&Dirt

“And ever I loved Maud with increasing love.  She was so many-sided, so many-mooded––’protean-mooded’ I called her.  But I called her this, and other and dearer things, in my thoughts only.  Though the declaration of my love urged and trembled on my tongue a thousand times, I knew that it was no time for such a declaration.  If for no other reason, it was no time, when one was protecting and trying to save a woman, to ask that woman for her love.  Delicate as was the situation, not alone in this but in other ways, I flattered myself that I was able to deal delicately with it; and also I flattered myself that by look or sign I gave no advertisement of the love I felt for her.  We were like good comrades, and we grew better comrades as the days went by.

One thing about her which surprised me was her lack of timidity and fear.  The terrible sea, the frail boat, the storms, the suffering, the strangeness and isolation of the situation,––all that should have frightened a robust woman,––seemed to make no impression upon her who had known life only in its most sheltered and consummately artificial aspects, and who has herself all fire and dew and mist, sublimated spirit, all that was soft and tender and clinging in woman.  And yet I am wrong.  She was timid and afraid, but she possessed courage.  The flesh and the qualms of the flesh she was heir to, but the flesh bore heavily only on the flesh.  And she was spirit, first and always spirit, etherealized essence of life, calm as her calm eyes, and sure of permanence in the changing order of the universe.”

––The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London, pg. 181

“The idea that we people are really walking assemblages, beings who have integrated various other kinds of organisms––that each of us is a sort of loose committee––opens up too many challenging speculations.  When ‘the committee’ gets sick, is simply a single animal getting sick, or is illness more a rearrangement of the members?  We imagine that pathogenic microbes attack us, but if such pathogens are part of the committee that makes up each of us to begin with, isn’t health less a question of resistance to invasion from the outside and much more an issue of ecological relationships among committee members?  Yes.

We humans, like all organisms, live embedded in ecological communities.  If, as individuals, we feel we are falling apart, it is probably because we multicomponented beings are, in fact, falling apart.  Each person, each dog, each tree is composed of many different living parts that can be detected and identified.  The relations among our living component parts are absolutely critical to our health, and therefore to our happiness.  The completely self-contained ‘individual’ is a myth that needs to be replaced with a more flexible description.”

––Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species, by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, pg. 19