The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.

Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?

Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary. The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea.

The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil.

The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water.

Then the song of a whitethroat, pure and ethereal, with the dreamy quality of remembered joy.

But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.