Jonathan

“For all his formidable self-confidence, he harboured doubts about the person he was at heart, and sometimes questioned whether he had a heart at all. Iris Caldwell, his girlfriend from Liverpool, recalled that her mother had accused him of being emotionally cold. It ate at him: years later, just before the release of 'Yesterday', Paul called Iris and said her mother should listen to Yesterday to see if it changed her mind. In an interview in the 1980s, he brought up the moment when he heard about his mother's death (‘What are we going to do for money?’), and said, ‘I’ve never forgiven myself for that. Really, deep down, I never have quite forgiven myself for that.’ As he danced through a Beatle life in which every door seemed to open the moment he touched it, he retained, in his mind, the baleful image of himself he drew as a teenager: a face that scowled rather than smiled. He once described his public self as 'pleasantly insincere’. He was drawn to those who saw through his masks and loved him nonetheless. Being accepted by John confirmed to him that he was special. Being loved by Linda, and by Heather, convinced him he was good.”
― Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

“Giant (and colossal) squid are unique in being massive animals that need to see massive predators, and their singular need has led to a singular Umwelt. With the largest and most sensitive eyes that exist, they scan one of the darkest environments on Earth for the faint sparkling outlines of charging whales.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“Over a third of humanity, and almost 80 percent of North Americans, can no longer see the Milky Way. "The thought of light traveling billions of years from distant galaxies only to be washed out in the last billionth of a second by the glow from the nearest strip mall depresses me no end," vision scientist Sonke Johnsen once wrote.

[…] Sensory pollution is the pollution of disconnection. It detaches us from the cosmos. It drowns out the stimuli that link animals to their surroundings and to each other. In making the planet brighter and louder, we have also fragmented it. While razing rainforests and bleaching coral reefs, we have also endangered sensory environments. That must now change. We have to save the quiet, and preserve the dark.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“The ones she had borne into the world, and the ones they in turn would bear, would from the beginning of their lives say what her own tongue was unable to say: At home here in America-back there in Sweden. With this thought, listening to her children's breathing, Kristina went to sleep.”
― Vilhelm Moberg, The Emigrants