3
" Goldfish in a glass bowl are harmless to the human mind, maybe even helpful to minds casting about for something, anything, to think about. But goldfish let loose, propagating themselves, worst of all surviving in what has to be a sessile eddy of the East River, somehow threaten us all. We do not like to think that life is possible under some conditions, especially the conditions of a Manhattan pond. There are four abandoned ties, any number of broken beer bottles, fourteen shoes and a single sneaker, and a visible layer, all over the surface, of that grayish-green film that settles on all New York surfaces. The mud at the banks of the pond is not proper country mud but reconstituted Manhattan landfill, ancient garbage, fossilized coffee grounds and grapefruit rind, the defecation of a city. For goldfish to be swimming in such water, streaking back and forth mysteriously in small schools, feeding, obviously feeding, looking as healthy and well-off as goldfish in the costliest kind of window-box aquarium, means something is wrong with our standards. It is, in some deep sense beyond words, insulting. "
― Lewis Thomas , The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
5
" We are endowed with genes which code out our reaction to beavers and otters, maybe our reaction to each other as well. We are stamped with stereotyped, unalterable patterns of response, ready to be released. And the behavior released in us, by such confrontations, is, essentially, a surprised affection. It is compulsory behavior and we can avoid it only by straining with the full power of our conscious minds, making up conscious excuses all the way. Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends. "
― Lewis Thomas , The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
7
" ...I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply and solidly, without confusion and without mixture, or in one word... what a piece of work is, after all, an ordinary man! You cannot help but hope.
...We are ignorant about how we work, how we fit in, and most of all about the enormous, imponderable system of life in which we are embedded as working parts. We do not understand nature at all...We need to know more...keep storing up a great mass of information for its own sake, creating a bank of information, ready for drawing on when the time for intelligent use arrives. "
― Lewis Thomas , The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
