Aquarium Day Quotes

All my life, I [Pari] have lived like an aquarium fish in the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have been free to observe the glimmering world on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But I have always been contained, hemmed in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence that Baba has constructed for me, at first knowingly, when I was young, and now guilelessly, now that he is fading day by day. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath.

They are so caught up in their happiness that they don't realize I'm not really a part of it. I am wandering along the periphery. I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood. . . . There are moments I just sit in my frame, float in my tank, ride in my car and say nothing, think nothing that connects me to anything at all.

I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that’s not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.

It's aquarium light and it's cathedral ceilings offered asylum and a lounge where coffee substitutes were served to those who still try to believe that life went on, and that tomorrow, or perhaps the day after tomorrow, would be just another day.

In 1935, not far from where we stood now, some fishermen captured a fourteen-foot beige shark and took it to a public aquarium at Coogee, where it was put on display. The shark swam around for a day or two in its new home, then abruptly, and to the certain surprise of the viewing public, regurgitated a human arm.

(Jen gets completely sloshed and it's not her wedding) I was supposed to meet Carol and her family at the aquarium the next morning, and somehow had the presence of mind to leave a voicemail apologizing in advance for not being able to make it. I was please at myself for being so responsible and considerate. After I left the message, I blissfully headed off to bed, wearing a face full of makeup, all my grown up jewelry, and a relatively restrictive girdle. Suffice it to say, yesterday was rough, what with my apartment spinning and all. But today I felt better. That is, until Carol played me the voice mail I left for her at 1:03 AM. Somehow I thought I had been able to hold it together on the phone. Following is a transcript of the message I left: 30 seconds of heavy breathing, giggling, and intermittent hiccups (At first Carol thought it was a 911 call.) Oh, heeheehee, I waassshh wayyyting for a beep. But noooooo beeeeeeep. Why don't you hash a beep on your, your, ummmmmm...celery phone? Noooooo beeeeeeep, hic, heeheeeheee. Um, hiiiiii, itsch JEENNNNNNNN!! It's thirteen o'clock in the peeeeeee eeeemmmmmmm. Heeeeeeeellllllllllloooooooo! I went to my wedding tonight and it wash sooooo niiiiiiiiiice. Hic." More giggling and the sound of a phone being dropped and retrieved Nannyway, I am calling to telllll you noooooooooo fishies tomorry...no fishies for meeee! I hic, heeeee, can't smake it to the quariyummm. Maybeeee you can call me so I can say HIIIIIIIIIIIIIII later hich in the day hee hee hee. Call me at, um, 312, ummmmmmm, 312, uummmmm, hee hee hee I can't member my phone, Hic. Do you know my number? Can you call me and tell me what it isssch? I LIKESH TURKEY SAMMICHES! 10 seconds of chewing, giggling, and what may be gobbling sounds Okay, GGGGGGGGooooooodniiiiiiiiiggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhttttt! No fish! Um, how do I turn this tthing off? Shhhhh, callllls' over. Beeee quiiiiiiietttt, hee hee hee." 15 more seconds of giggles, hiccups, shushing, and a great deal of banging Perhaps this is why most people only have one wedding?

I leave entry for the first day of the tenth month in the year the albatross came to the south-western halls This morning I fetched the small cardboard box with the word AQUARIUM and the picture of an octopus on it. It is the box that originally contained the shoes Dr Ketterley gave me. When Dr Ketterley told me to hide Myself from 16, I took the ornaments out of my hair and placed them in the box. But now, wanting to look my best when I enter the New World, I spent two or three hours putting them back in, all the pretty things that I have found or made: seashells, coral beads, pearls, tiny pebbles and interesting fishbones. When Raphael arrived, she seemed rather astonished at my pleasant appearance. I took my messenger bag with all my Journals and my favourite pens and we walked towards the two Minotaurs in the South-Eastern Corner. The shadows between them shimmered slightly. The shadows suggested the shape of a corridor or alleyway with dim walls and, at the end of it, lights, flashes of moving colour that my eye could not interpret. I took one last look at the Eternal House. I shivered. Raphael took my hand. Then, together, we walked into the corridor.

I remember his last day. He was lying calmly in bed with his eyes closed, when his whole body suddenly went slack. He made a little gesture with his hand, smiling slightly—what I later realized was his final farewell. That’s how he died, without our even realizing it. That scene changed my perception of death. Previously, it always wore a mask of terror; I never imagined it could be so peaceful. Since then, death no longer scares me. My father showed me it could be a moment for smiling.

All my life, I have lived like an aquarium fish in the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have been free to observe the glimmering world on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But I have always been contained, hemmed in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence that Baba has constructed for me, at first knowingly, when I was young, and now guilelessly, now that he is fading day by day. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath.

On dark days like that one, the library windows looked lit up like an aquarium, the inhabitants on display for all the other kids to see: here the most exotic fish, the lonely, the unloved, the weird.

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie. I remember how much I used to stutter. I remember the first time I saw television. Lucille Ball was taking ballet lessons. I remember Aunt Cleora who lived in Hollywood. Every year for Christmas she sent my brother and me a joint present of one book. I remember a very poor boy who had to wear his sister's blouse to school. I remember shower curtains with angel fish on them. I remember very old people when I was very young. Their houses smelled funny. I remember daydreams of being a singer all alone on a big stage with no scenery, just one spotlight on me, singing my heart out, and moving my audience to total tears of love and affection. I remember waking up somewhere once and there was a horse staring me in the face. I remember saying "thank you" in reply to "thank you" and then the other person doesn't know what to say. I remember how embarrassed I was when other children cried. I remember one very hot summer day I put ice cubes in my aquarium and all the fish died. I remember not understanding why people on the other side of the world didn't fall off.

What I must know is whether you are indeed one of those creatures in the lowest grade of mentality and even of charm, one of those contemptible creatures who are incapable of foregoing a pleasure. For if you are such, how could anyone love you, for you are not even a person, a definite, imperfect, but at least perceptible entity. You are a formless water that will trickle down any slope that it may come upon, a fish devoid of memory, incapable of thought, which all its life long in its aquarium will continue to dash itself, a hundred times a day, against a wall of glass, always mistaking it for water.

What I must know is whether you are indeed one of those creatures in the lowest grade of mentality and even of charm, one of those contemptible creatures who are incapable of forgoing a pleasure. And if you are such, how could anyone love you, for you are not even a person, a clearly defined entity, imperfect but at least perfectible. You are a formless water that will trickle down any slope that offers itself, a fish devoid of memory, incapable of thought, which all its life long in its aquarium will continue to dash itself a hundred times a day against the glass wall, always mistaking it for water.

Sleep, she said. Sleep while you can. Forget where you are and forget the mountain of days. Each one enormous, lost in some forest that never ends, but then the edge will fold back and you'll walk on what was the sky and is now only another forest floor, another layer, and you can feel the weight of hundreds of these layers above you.

All the long afternoon, the sea was suspended there before their eyes only as a canvas of attractive colouring might hang on the wall of a wealthy bachelor’s flat and it was only in the intervals between the ‘hands’ that one of the players, finding nothing better to do, raised his eyes to it to seek from it some indication of the weather or the time, and to remind the others that tea was ready. And at night they did not dine in the hotel, where, hidden springs of electricity flooding the great dining-room with light, it became as it were an immense and wonderful aquarium against whose wall of glass the working population of Balbec, the fishermen and also the tradesmen’s families, clustering invisibly in the outer darkness, pressed their faces to watch, gently floating upon the golden eddies within, the luxurious life of its occupants, a thing as extraordinary to the poor as the life of strange fishes or molluscs (an important social question, this: whether the wall of glass will always protect the wonderful creatures at their feasting, whether the obscure folk who watch them hungrily out of the night will not break in some day to gather them from their aquarium and devour them).

The house was inherited. Death had furnished it for her. She trod in the dining-room on the Turkey carpet of her fathers; she regulated her day by the excellent black clock on the mantelpiece which she remembered from childhood; her walls were entirely covered by the photographs her illustrious deceased friends had either given herself or her father, with their own handwriting across the lower parts of their bodies, and the windows, shrouded by the maroon curtains of all her life, were decorated besides with the selfsame aquariums to which she owed her first lessons in sealore, and in which still swam slowly the goldfishes of her youth.

The Pillowcase" is printed with iridescent fish, each facing a different direction. I bought it for you at the Portland Goodwill our last semester in college. Spring break we brought it camping. I pretended I’d eaten sardines before, pretended I liked them. I don’t remember what you said when the condom broke. Probably ‘Oh, shit.’ The next day we drove into town. I took a pill and another pill and it was over. I couldn’t tell the difference, could have told my friends but didn’t, just made lots of dead baby jokes and went to bed in your dorm room. You’d put painter’s tape on all the edges. With the pillowcase, it was like living in the blueprint of an aquarium. I slept there the night I smoked Sasha’s weed and you stayed up for hours rubbing my back, telling fairytales so I wouldn’t totally lose it. I slept there the night I tried reading you Haruki Murakami’s Sleep but fell asleep. I slept there the night after the day I lost the bet and had to wear a lampshade on my head and your professor said ‘Nice hat.’ Later I learned she owns a lamp in the shape of a woman. I slept there the night you said ‘I think I’m falling in love with you,’ igniting a great unendurable belongingness, like a match in a forest fire. I burned so long so quiet you must have wondered if I loved you back. I did, I did, I do.

up for it, and I’m sorry. That’s not enough. You’re going to search until you find something, and you’re going to tell me. Right now. Sheri. Please. You do it now or we’re gone. You give me some way to have some sympathy for you as I stand in this nice house, all lovingly redone, and think about the broken house you left us in, with its leaky roof and no heat and no insulation and nothing. Tell your sob story about the fucking war, whatever it was that my mom thought you were so broken about. My grandfather closed his eyes. No story ever explains. But I’ll give you what you want. I think I know the moment you want, because I made a kind of decision. There was some change. But I can’t start the story at the beginning. I’ve never been able to do that. I have to start at the end and then go back, and it doesn’t finish, because you can go back forever. Do it, my mother said. I don’t think Caitlin should hear. She can hear. Okay. You’re her mother. That’s right. So I won’t give the awful details, but I was lying in a pile of bodies. My friends. The closest friends I’ve ever had. Not piled there on purpose, but just the way it ended up because I had been working on the axle, lying on the ground. And the thing is, the war was over. It had been over for days, and we were laughing and a bit drunk, telling jokes. There was something unbearable about the fact that we’d all be going our separate ways now. The truth is that we didn’t want to leave. We wanted the war over, but we didn’t want what we had together to be over. I think we all had some sense that this was the closest we’d ever be to anyone, and that our families might feel like strangers now. So that’s it? You couldn’t be a father and husband because you weren’t done being a buddy? No. No. It’s the way it happened, in a moment that was supposed to be safe. After every moment of every day in fear for years, we were finally safe, and that’s when the slugs came and I watched my friends torn apart and landing on me, dying. That’s the point. We were supposed to be safe. And with your mother, too, I was supposed to be safe. A wife, a family. The story doesn’t make any sense unless you know every moment before it, every time we thought we were going to die, all the times we weren’t safe. You can’t just be told about that. You have to feel it, how long one night can be, and then all of them put together, hundreds of nights and then more, and there’s a kind of deal that’s made, a deal with god. You do certain terrible things, you endure things, because there’s a bargain made. And then when god says the deal’s off later, after you’ve already paid, and you see your friends ripped through, yanked like puppets on a day that was safe, and you find out your wife is going to die young, and you get to watch her dying, something that again is going to be for years, hundreds of nights more, all deals are off.

EB: 'Ll showed me a long verse-letter, very obscene, he’d received from Dylan T[Thomas] before D’s last trip here [New York]—very clever, but it really can’t be published for a long, long time, he’s decided. About people D. met in the U.S. etc.—one small sample: A Streetcar Named Desire is referred to as 'A truck called F———.' RL: 'Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.' RL: 'I have just finished the Yeats Letters—900 & something pages—although some I’d read before. He is so Olympian always, so calm, so really unrevealing, and yet I was fascinated.' RL: 'Probably you forget, and anyway all that is mercifully changed and all has come right since you found Lota. But at the time everything, I guess (I don’t want to overdramatize) our relations seemed to have reached a new place. I assumed that would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept. Yet I wanted it all to have the right build-up. Well, I didn’t say anything then.' EB: 'so I suppose I am just a born worrier, and that when the personal worries of adolescence and the years after it have more or less disappeared I promptly have to start worrying about the decline of nations . . . But I really can’t bear much of American life these days—surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time.

(It’s a doozy! I could listen to it all day long.) Nikki Lane—“Gone, Gone, Gone,” “Coming Home to You” Patterson Hood—“Belvedere,” “Back of a Bible” Ryan Bingham—“Guess Who’s Knocking” American Aquarium—“Casualties” Devil Doll—“The Things You Make Me Do” American Aquarium—“I’m Not Going to the Bar” Hank Williams Jr.—“Family Tradition” David Allan Coe—“Mama Tried” John Paul Keith—“She’ll Dance to Anything” Carl Perkins—“Honey, Don’t” Scott H. Biram—“Lost Case of Being Found” The Cramps—“The Way I Walk” The Reverend Horton Heat—“Jimbo Song” Justin Townes Earle—“Baby’s Got a Bad Idea” Old Crow Medicine Show—“Wagon Wheel,” “Hard to Love” Dirty River Boys—“My Son” JD McPherson—“Wolf Teeth” Empress of Fur—“Mad Mad Bad Bad Mama” Dwight Yoakam—“Little Sister” The Meteors—“Psycho for Your Love” Hayes Carll—“Love Don’t Let Me Down” HorrorPops—“Dotted with Hearts” Buddy Holly—“Because I Love You” Chris Isaak—“Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing” Jason Isbell—“The Devil Is My Running Mate” Lindi Ortega—“When All the Stars Align” Three Bad Jacks—“Scars” Kasey Anderson and the Honkies—“My Blues, My Love

Smiling to myself, I pictured our family one sunny afternoon last fall. It had been a warm day, and we were on our way to the city aquarium. Dad had the car windows rolled down, and I recalled the feel of the wind in my hair and the scent of Mom’s perfume wafting from the seat in front of me. Mom and Dad were chatting and I was scrolling through my Instagram feed. But the moment the song sounded on the radio, I squealed. “Turn it up!” I said, leaning forward in my seat, enough that the belt tightened across my chest. As soon as Dad reached over and turned the knob, I started singing the lyrics aloud. Both Mom and Dad joined in. With the wind in my hair and the music filling the car, a warmth had filled my insides, almost as if I were wrapped in my favorite fuzzy blanket. The memory was fresh in my mind and I could still see Mom’s head bob up and down as she sang while Dad tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “Come on, Dad!” I said, giggling. “Sing with us.” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “I’m waiting for my favorite part. I don’t want to stretch my singing muscles.” “What singing muscles?” Mom smiled at him. He put a finger in the air for her to wait. “Here we go.” When the chorus of the song began, Dad screeched out the lyrics in a really high voice. He was trying to mimic the singer’s voice but he wasn’t even close and the sound he made was terrible. I burst out laughing. He ignored me and continued to sing, all the while, waving a hand through the air with wide flourishes, as if conducting an orchestra. He tilted his head back and belted out the high notes. When we pulled up at a red traffic light and the car slowed to a stop, Dad was oblivious of the carload of people alongside us watching him. The passengers of the other car had their windows open too and I stared at them in horror. Their eyes were glued to Dad and they shook their heads and rolled their eyes. “Dad!” I called to him. “Those people are watching you.” But he didn’t hear me and continued to sing. I sank into my seat, my cheeks flushing. He finally realized he had an audience but instead of being embarrassed, he waved to them. “Hello, there!” he said. “Did you enjoy my singing?” The light turned green, and the carload of people cracked up laughing as their car lurched forward in their hurry to escape the weird man in the car next to theirs. Dad shrugged. “I guess not.’ Mom and I burst out laughing too, unable to hold it in any longer. Dad waved a dismissive hand. “They wouldn’t know good music if it hit them in the face.” Tears sprang from my eyes because I was laughing so hard. My dad could be so embarrassing sometimes, but that day, it didn’t bother me at all. Dad had always managed to make me laugh at the silliest things. He had a way of making me feel happy, regardless of what mood I was in. Deep down I thought he was a really cool dad. My friends thought so too. He wasn’t boring and super strict like their dads. He was fun to be around and everyone loved him for it, including my friends. Our little family was perfect, and I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

On dark days like that one, the library windows looked lit up like an aquarium , the inhabitants on display for all the other kids to see: here the most exotic fish, the lonely, the unloved, the weird.

At the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, the dolphins developed stress-induced ulcers. Shopping malls are enough to drive most individuals insane, given enough time spent in them. For Edmonton’s dolphins, though, there was no escape. Every day was the same. Shows were performed twice a day. The water tanks never got any larger. The light always remained artificial. The crowds of shoppers never stopped coming. The enervating elevator music never stopped playing. So it was hardly surprising that all four of the mall’s dolphins suffered from stress-related afflictions.

Sea World orcas work as many as eight shows a day, 365 days a year. In the ocean, these whales can swim up to ninety miles a day. In captivity, the tanks are measured in feet. In the ocean, orcas have highly evolved and cohesive matriarchal cultures. Generations of family members, combining both females and males, spend their entire lives together—with each family, or pod, communicating its own unique dialect. In captivity, little to none of this exists. Orca culture is effectively destroyed.

I know that fish, generally speaking, don’t know what’s happening outside their tanks. Still, as soon as I left the aquarium, the axolotls pounced to devour the janitor fish. When I came back to check on them, the axolotls were back on the bottom of the tank. A few days later they finally tore each other to pieces.

For almost a week the creature swam contentedly in its exhibit, until on Anzac Day, 25 April, it took a turn for the worse. Being a public holiday, the aquarium was busy, and many people peered through the glass to get a glimpse of the ferocious predator. After seeming to be disoriented and listless, it suddenly vomited up its entire stomach contents, causing the watching public to recoil, for floating in the foul-smelling discharge was a half-digested rat, a bird, and a tattooed human arm. When the arm was examined by a pathologist, it turned out that it had been cleanly severed from the body with a knife.

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When fish nociceptors fire, the signals travel to parts of the brain that deal with learning and other behaviors more complex than simple reflexes. Sure enough, when the animals are pinched, shocked, or injected with toxins, they’ll behave differently for hours or days—or until they get painkillers. They’ll make sacrifices to get those drugs, or to avoid further discomfort. In one experiment, Sneddon showed that zebrafish prefer to swim in an aquarium full of plants and gravel than in one that’s empty. But if she injected the fish with acetic acid and dissolved a painkiller in the water of the barren aquarium, they abandoned their normal preferences and chose the boring but soothing environment instead. In another study, Sarah Millsopp and Peter Laming trained goldfish to feed in a specific part of an aquarium, and then gave them an electric shock. The fish fled and stayed away for days, forgoing food in the process. They eventually returned, but did so more quickly if they were hungry or if the shock had been mild. Their initial escape might have been reflexive, but they then weighed up the pros and cons of avoiding further harm. As Braithwaite wrote in her book, Do Fish Feel Pain?, “There is as much evidence that fish feel pain and suffer as there is for birds and mammals.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl. She lived in a town four hours away from here, in a house on a street named Daisy Lane. She had a mother and a father and her own room and a TV and sometimes could stay up late to watch movies on the weekend if she ate all her dinner. She had a cat and three best friends and wanted to work with dolphins. She had posters of them on her walls, and her computer screen saver was one, a dolphin with warm eyes and a sweet grin gleaming out at you. All her stuffed animals, except for the stupid ones her grandparents gave her, were dolphins. One day she went to the aquarium. She wore blue jeans, a white shirt (no logos, no designs), and sneakers (white, with white socks). She went with her fifth-grade class, and since it was three days before her 10th birthday, she thought her friends would let her sit by the window on the bus. They didn't. And when they got to the aquarium, there weren't any dolphins and her friends got mad because she wouldn't loan them her lip gloss; it was new, it tasted like cream soda, and she didn't want to share. She was a selfish little girl. She paid for it.

Security was, though, an ongoing rock-paper-scissors match between technologies that all seemed to want different things. The lobby of the building, its elevators and stairwells, and its exterior belts of walkways and gardens had all been covered by security cameras from the very beginning of Zula and Csongor’s tenancy. In those days a security guard would sit all day behind a reception desk in the lobby, keeping an eye on the main entrance, glancing down from time to time at an array of flat-panel monitors that showed him the feeds from those cameras. But the desk had been torn out some years ago and replaced with a big saltwater aquarium. The building still employed a security firm. But those guards who were human, and who were actually on site, spent most of the day up on their feet, strolling about the property while keeping track of events in wearable devices. Some of the “guards” were just algorithms, analyzing video and audio feeds for suspicious behavior, recognizing faces and cross-checking them against a whitelist of residents, friends, and neighbors, and a blacklist of predators, stalkers, and ex-husbands. Anything ambiguous was forwarded to a Southeast Asian eyeball farm.

White of snow or white of page is not" the white of your skin, for skin, except when truly albino, always has some other color sleeping within it—a hint of red maple leaf, a touch of the blue ice at the edge of a melting stream, a richness implied of its many layers, the deltas of cells and blood, that deep fecundity that lies within and makes the skin shed, not like a snake, but as a tree (one of those golden cottonwoods flaring just now at the edge of the river) that sheds its leaves each moment while an eternity of leaf remains. Oh, nothing seems to me as white as your skin, all your languid ease of being—one resting upon the other, the sliver of your shoulder against the black fabric—reminds me so of the lost realm of beauty that I am afraid of nothing, and only dazed (as I was that day at the aquarium when the beluga whales came swimming toward me—how white they were, slipping out of the darkness, radiant and buoyant as silence and snow, incandescent as white fire, gliding through the weight of water, and when they sang in that chamber as small as the chambers of the human heart, murky with exhaustion and captivity and the fragments of what they had consumed, I was almost in love with them; they seemed the lost children of the moon, carrying in their milky mammalian skins a hint of glacial ice and singing to each other of all the existences they had left behind, their fins like the wings of birds or angels, clicking and whistling like canaries of the sea: there was no darkness in their bodies, like clouds drifting through unkempt skies, they illuminated the room). So I did not think of you so much as I felt you drifting through my being, in some gesture that held me poised like a hummingbird above the scarlet blossoms of the trumpet vine, I kissed you above the heart, and by above I mean there, not that geometric center, the breastbone that so many use to divide the body in half and so mistake for the place where the heart lies, but the exact location, a little to the left, just on the crescent where the breast begins to rise; oh, I know all that drift of white implies, the vanished clothing, the disappearing room, that landscape of the skin and night that opens in imagination and in feeling upon a sea of snow, so that just one kiss above the heart is a kiss upon the heart, as if one could kiss the very pulse of being, light upon the head of that pin that pins us here, that tiny disk where angels were once believed to dance, and all that nakedness without could not have been except for all that burning deep within

The permission slip outlined our agenda for the day: aquarium, lunch, planetarium, museum. The trip was in eight weeks, just before Thanksgiving break. Mr. Ted went over every detail piece by piece, but no one was really listening. Everyone was blabbing about how lucky we were that we didn’t get stuck with a boring trip to the state capitol. I was busy thinking about the Dog Log and tearing the chaperone sign-up portion from the bottom of the paper so I could get rid of it.

I believe God, but I don’t believe in him. When this doesn’t make sense, I tell people I believe 3/7 days a week—almost, sometimes, losingly. But that there is a battle at all is due to the following reason: when I see new things, I can’t believe they exist! Switzerland. The Grand Canyon. The skin color of aquarium fish. Dinosaur fossils. A moon. What idiot am I to deny that there can exist any amazing thing ranging from a 30-eyed eagle to a God? Spiders have eight eyes. And there was once a man who walked on water.