Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga - stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.

If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can't go at dawn and not many places he can't go at noon. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walking - one sport you shouldn't have to reserve a time and a court for.

Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days.

There often seems to be a playfulness to wise people, as if either their equanimity has as its source this playfulness or the playfulness flows from equanimity; and they can persuade other people who are in a state of agitation to calm down and smile.

To relive the relationship between owner and slave we can consider how we treat our cars and dogs - a dog exercising a somewhat similar leverage on our mercies and an automobile being comparable in value to a slave in those days

Men often compete with one another until the day they die. Comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor.

Indeed, if "biology is chemistry with history," as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love.