“We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isn’t terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn’t very important in the world. And six thousand miles away the great bombs are falling on London and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is.”
– John Steinbeck,
Sea of Cortez, 1941
In case you were wondering, the name of the 1944
Salvador Dali painting above is One Second Before
Awakening from a Dream Caused by the Flight of
a Bee Around a Pomegranate.
Dali was Spanish.