Michael Davis

“Harry was so exasperated by his frog experiments that one day he began venting to anyone who would listen. He even told his undergraduate class that he had spent countless hours just to prove that frogs were stupid. One of the students happened to be a reporter for the student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, and the next day, Harry was in print: “Professor Harlow says that the frog is the dumbest of all animals.... Professor Harlow’s experiments showed that the frog does not seem to be able to learn anything at all.” It was a natural story for any journalist. The next day, one of the local papers rewrote the student version. It now carried the headline: “Frog Dumbest of Animals, Experimenters Discover.” That”
― Deborah Blum, Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing---
each stone, blossom, child---
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.”
― Martin Buber