It Has Been Asserted That

Since The First Human Eye Saw A Leaf In Devonian Sandstone And A Puzzled Finger Reached To Touch It, Sadness Has Lain Over The Heart Of Man. By This Tenuous Thread Of Living Protoplasm, Stretching Backward Into Time, We Are Linked Forever To Lost Beaches Whose Sands Have Long Since Hardened Into Stone. The Stars That Caught Our Blind Amphibian Stare Have Shifted Far Or Vanished In Their Courses, But Still That Naked, Glistening Thread Winds Onward. No One Knows The Secret Of Its Beginning Or Its End. Its Forms Are Phantoms. The Thread Alone Is Real; The Thread Is Life.

I Once Saw, On A Flower Pot In My Own Living Room, The Efforts Of A Field Mouse To Build A Remembered Field. I Have Lived To See This Episode Repeated In A Thousand Guises, And Since I Have Spent A Large Portion Of My Life In The Shade Of A Nonexistent Tree I Think I Am Entitled To Speak For The Field Mouse.

I Love Forms Beyond My Own, And Regret The Borders Between Us

Perhaps A Creature Of So Much Ingenuity And Deep Memory Is Almost Bound To Grow Alienated From His World, His Fellows, And The Objects Around Him. He Suffers From A Nostalgia For Which There Is No Remedy Upon Earth Except As It Is To Be Found In The Enlightenment Of The Spirit--some Ability To Have A Perceptive Rather Than An Exploitive Relationship With His Fellow Creatures.

I Am Not Nearly So Interested In What Monkey Man Was Derived From As I Am In What Kind Of Monkey He Is To Become.