All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.
Judge me for my own merits, or lack of them, but do not look upon me as a mere appendage to this great general or that great scholar, this star that shines at the court of France or that famed author. I am in my own right a whole person, responsible to myself alone for all that I am, all that I say, all that I do. It may be that there are metaphysicians and philosophers whose learning is greater than mine, although I have not met them. Yet, they are but frail humans, too, and have their faults; so, when I add the sum total of my graces, I confess I am inferior to no one.
i feel like i can’t go anywhere anymore without people soothsaying my downfall. even the cashier at taco bell was all “the flock of crows taken to following you portend a disastrous and blah blah fucking blah,” i get it, i’m about to undergo a storm of tribulation, what frickin ever
I cannot…describe what Mallory has done to an already terrifying book:
“Can you take someone else’s Real,” he asked, “or are you stuck getting it on your own?”
The Skin Horse looked at the Rabbit then.
“What I mean is,” the Rabbit said carefully. “If something else was already Real. Could you take it from them, and keep it for yourself.”
“No,” the Skin Horse said, and his voice was a crawling black thing across the floor. “You can’t take Real from another toy.”
But the Rabbit wasn’t finished. “Can you take the Real out of a boy? Can you take his heart in your own self and leave him with a sawdust heart on the nursery floor in your place?”
And the Skin Horse did not say anything.
“I suppose you are real?” said the Rabbit. And the Skin Horse was afraid for the first time in a long time.
- Tom Bombadil, to everyone, book I, chapter VII
We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them. We wanted to hatch out of clean, smooth, beautiful eggs, as they did, back when we were young and agile and innocent of cause and effect, we did not want the mess of being born, and so we crammed the birds into our gullets, feathers and all, but it was no use, we couldn’t sing, not effortlessly as they do, we can’t fly, not without smoke and metal, and as for the eggs we don’t stand a chance. We’re mired in gravity, we’re earthbound. We’re ankle-deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no.
The raven is sometimes known as “the wolf-bird.” Ravens, like many other animals, scavenge at wolf kills, but there’s more to it than that. Both wolves and ravens have the ability to form social attachments and they seem to have evolved over many years to form these attachments with each other, to both species’ benefit.
There are a couple of theories as to why wolves and ravens end up at the same carcasses. One is that because ravens can fly, they are better at finding carcasses than wolves are. But they can’t get to the food once they get there, because they can’t open up the carcass. So they’ll make a lot of noise, and then wolves will come and use their sharp teeth and strong jaws to make the food accessible not just to themselves, but also to the ravens.
Ravens have also been observed circling a sick elk or moose and calling out, possibly alerting wolves to an easy kill. The other theory is that ravens respond to the howls of wolves preparing to hunt (and, for that matter, to human hunters shooting guns). They find out where the wolves are going and following. Both theories may be correct.
Wolves and ravens also play. A raven will sneak up behind a wolf and yank its tail and the wolf will play back. Ravens sometimes respond to wolf howls with calls of their own, resulting in a concert of howls and calls.
I can’t wait for this Disney film duo.
