Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense.

At some indeterminate point in their life cycles, they cause themselves to be placed in artificial stone or wooden cocoons, or chrysalises. They have an idea that they will someday emerge from these in an altered state, which they symbolize with carvings of themselves with wings. However, we did not observe that any had actually done so.

I thought this sort of thing was strictly forbidden,” I say.“Well, officially,” he says. “But everyone’s human, after all.”I wait for him to elaborate on this, but he doesn’t, so I say, “What does that mean?”“It means you can’t cheat Nature,” he says.

In the gap between desire and enactment, noun and verb, intention and infliction, want and have, compassion begins.