Sophistication" Is Another Word For

The Zest For Life Of Those Unusual Men And Women Who Make A Great Zealous Success Of Living Is Due More Often In Good Part To The Craftiness And Pertinacity With Which They Manage To Overlook The Misery Of Others. You Can Watch Them Watch Life Beat The Stuffing Out Of The Faces Of Their Friends And Acquaintances, Although They Themselves Seem To Outwit The Dense Delays Of Social Custom, The Tedious Tick-tock Of Bureaucratic Obfuscation, Accepting Loss And Age And Change And Disappointment Without Suffering Punctures In Their Stomach Lining.

Henry David Thoreau, Who Never Earned Much Of A Living Or Sustained A Relationship With Any Woman That Wasn't Brotherly -- Who Lived Mostly Under His Parents' Roof . . . Who Advocated One Day's Work And Six Days "off" As The Weekly Round And Was Considered A Bit Of A Fool In His Hometown . . . Is Probably The American Writer Who Tells Us Best How To Live Comfortably With Our Most Constant Companion, Ourselves.

It's Incongruous That The Older We Get, The More Likely We Are To Turn In The Direction Of Religion. Less Vivid And Intense Ourselves, Closer To The Grave, We Begin To Conceive Of Ourselves As Immortal.

Land Of Opportunity, Land For The Huddled Masses Where Would The Opportunity Have Been Without The Genocide Of Those Old Guard, Bristling Indian Tribes?

Indeed, If "biology Is Chemistry With History," As Somebody Has Said, Then Nature Writing Is Biology With Love.