Reader

“This concept is intuitive, and yet when we watch extremophiles, from emperor penguins braving the Antarctic chill to camels trekking over scorching sands, it’s easy to think that they are suffering throughout their lives. We admire them not just for their physiological resilience but also for their psychological fortitude. We project our senses onto theirs and assume that they’d be in discomfort because we’d be in discomfort. But their senses are tuned to the temperatures in which they live. A camel likely isn’t distressed by the baking sun, and penguins probably don’t mind huddling through an Antarctic storm. Let the storm rage on. The cold doesn’t bother them, anyway.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness, idleness no longer as stretches of freedom reclaimed by stealth here and there from involuntary labour, surreptitious thefts to be enjoyed sitting on his heels before a flowerbed with the fork dangling from his fingers, but as a yielding up of himself to time, to a time flowing slowly like oil from horizon to horizon over the face of the world, washing over his body, circulating in his armpits and his groin, stirring his eyelids. He was neither pleased nor displeased when there was work to do; it was all the same. He could lie all afternoon with his eyes open, staring at the corrugations in the roof-iron and the tracings of rust; his mind would not wander, he would see nothing but the iron, the lines would not transform themselves into pattern or fantasy; he was himself, lying in his own house, the rust was merely rust, all that was moving was time, bearing him onward in its flow.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.”
― J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals

“Dogs have a facial muscle that can raise their inner eyebrows, giving them a soulful, plaintive expression. This muscle doesn’t exist in wolves. It’s the result of centuries of domestication, in which dog faces were inadvertently reshaped to look a bit more like ours. Those faces are now easier to read, and better at triggering a nurturing response.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us