Boria Sax Quotes

We poetically construct our identity as human beings, together with our values, largely through reciprocal relationships with animals. They provide us with essential points of reference, as well as illustrations of the qualities that we may choose to emulate or avoid in ourselves. Any major change in our relationships with animals, individual or collective, reverberates profoundly in our character as human beings, in ways that go far beyond immediately pragmatic concerns. When a species becomes extinct, something perishes in the human soul as well.

It is possible that the city of London was initially named for ravens or a raven-deity. According to the Oxford Companion to the English Language, the designation comes from "Londinium," a Romanized version of an earlier Celtic name. But the word closely resembles "Lugdunum," the Roman name for both the city of Lyon in France and Leiden in the Netherlands. That Roman name, in turn, was derived from the Celtic "Lugdon," which meant, literally, "hill, or town, of the god Lugh" or, alternatively, " ... of ravens." The site of Lyon was initially chosen for a town when a flock of ravens, avatars of the god, settled there. Whether or not "Lugdunum" was the origin of "London," ravens were important for inhabitants of Britain for both practical and religious reasons.

History, for better or worse, is 'us' on a grand scale - full of secrets, beauty, fear, longing, and stifled love. Without history, our lives would not be complete, and we could not be, in the best sense, fully 'human.

We writers constantly try to build up our own confidence by getting published, making sales, winning prizes, joining cliques or proclaiming theories. The passion to write constantly strips this vanity aside and forces us to confront that loneliness and the uncertainty with which human beings, in the end, live and die.

Those who romanticize war often like to think of it, at least in areas of mortal peril, as nothing but "guts and glory." Those who are inclined to pacifism, by contrast, often think of it as an unbroken sequence of horrors. Actually, however, people in wartime still fall in love, do the laundry, worry about pimples, drink beer, and do most of the same things that they do in times of peace. The patterns of daily life may be mundane, but they are remarkably tenacious.
But, while people in wartime still go about their daily routines, the prospect of imminent death can give even quotidian chores a heightened intensity. When the first bombs were dropped on London in autumn of 1940, the population bore adversity better than almost anybody had expected. The danger was mixed with excitement, and the terror had a sort of apocalyptic magnificence.

For the house of Dunraven, the ravens represented a spiritual claim to the Tower for the Celtic, especially the Welsh, people. For the English, the ravens represented the colorful savagery of their ancestors, which, however, testified to the exalted state of civilization they had since achieved. The national sagas of the Welsh and English gradually blended in tall tales told to tourists by Yeoman Warders, to eventually create a national myth. The romanticized past of Wales, predicated on survival, was fused with that of England, predicated on progress and conquest, to create a legend of Britain.

Snakes can have dozens of young at a time, and so they are often symbols of fertility. They resemble vegetation, especially roots, in their form and often in the green and brown of their skins. The undulating form of a snake also suggests a river. A point of muscular tension passes through the body of a snake and drives the animal forward, like a moment moving along a continuum of days and years. Like time itself, a snake seems to progress while remaining still. In addition, the body of a snake also resembles those marks with a stylus, brush, or pen that make up our letters. Ornamental alphabets of the ancient Celts and others were often made up of intertwined serpents. It could even be that the tracks of a snake in sand helped to inspire the invention of the alphabet. The manner in which snakes curl up in a ball has made people associate them with the sun.