modigliani - The Monday Morning Memo

“We had sat beside the little pool and watched the tree-frogs and the horsehair worms and the waterskaters, and had wondered how they got there, so far from other water. It seemed to us that life in every form is incipiently everywhere waiting for a chance to take root and start reproducing; eggs, spores, seeds, bacilli, – everywhere. Let a raindrop fall and it is crowded with the waiting life. Everything is everywhere; and we, seeing the desert country, the hot waterless expanse, and knowing how far away the nearest water must be, say with a kind of disbelief, ‘How did they get clear here, these little animals?’ And until we can attack with our poor blunt weapon of reason that causal process and reduce it, we do not quite believe in the horsehair worms and the tree-frogs. The great fact is that they are there.”

- John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, p. 164, (1941)

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