Ik heb een boek dat uniek is in zijn soort. Het heet Dancing with Mosquitoes.

Het is geschreven door een Amerikaanse bioloog die in Alaska zijn brood verdient met vissen (ofzo).

Het Engels is vrij moeilijk, maar oh zo prachtig om te lezen. Als je het leuk vindt, kan ik er meerdere essays uit plaatsen. Nu alleen deze:
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When my soul is in the comfortable, the practical and hooked on common sense, it is a fish landed on a pier leaping out of tune

My moments worth living have not been the prize of comfort and safety. They didn't come from sitting down. I found that it was those cussed hardships and curled roads one is out to abolish that sparked the few triumphs of living still serving me well. They came from eruptions that shattered the husk in which I nicely curled up my love and my mind. They came from unpopular goals given to me that I have finally taken on, from the terror of change which I did not let turn me back, but which I turned into a "let's try me out." They came from being a brave little tern circling its own white circles high above an immense indigo sea of "thou shalt not"s, and I set out on my own assuming a man's worth amounts to what's unique in him. I discovered that acts which do not comfort, but animate, are our best seeds - and are serenaded by all the emotions of pregnancy.

When I remain curious instead of whining, I may make out the gift wrapped in a hindrance that life has planted in my way. My soul thrives on the witty, the mischievous, the curly, anything that's not neatly balanced and straight. My soul conspires with the wild and likes to dance with the mosquitoes, the paradoxes and the wolf. I am reluctant to become a professional rationalist and to dedicate myself to the "better behaved" world so widely advertised, because I fear that in it the faint capacity for ecstasy will never awaken in me.

I live on the few things in a day that I do not clench in my weak little logic but give up to the heart to decide. My reason is definitely a nonswimmer. Why let the artists serve me the ocean experience cup by cup? Take off your seven coats, Theo, dive in!

Moar plez.

Tell me, who among the modest and the generous could ever fill our space rockets' enormous fuel tanks? Might it not rather be from professional profiteers that the huge loans for such fantastic happenings will come?

Some of us are born with shallow roots and are not meant to dig into the dirt for food. No vigorous health, no fingernails, no leathery skin, no deep fluffy lungs, no mind to kill. Instead they are made to rely on their wits and on our industries' regurgitated food.

This might be the man who specializes in terror, composing pictures that should shake and frighten me. He spreads addictions and makes them pay. He lives on strikes, on breakdowns, on the desperation of my heart. He may hook me on credit cards. He may polish his nearsightedness to a microscope so perfectly focused on our today, he simply "out observes" in details his more poetic friend whose left eye likes to wonder off to the clouds and whales, to the future and past. He may live from dubious laws, from pebbles he sneaks into my soup. This wizard may juggle my figures and zig-zags his thoughts so heavenly fast, that he leaves my pockets empty and me dumbfounded in the dark. He mumbo-jumbos my drowsy mind into some invented shame and carries a sweet, cheerful absolution in his pocket for sale. He is the father of psychology who learned from the gypsy matron the skill of how to probe for my weaknesses, my secret cracks, bents, vices and hang-ups, the holes in my integrity, my penchants and cowardice. If I let him, he discreetly fills my heart with thorns and offers to take them out again taking a chicken for pay. At night he might very dimly hold up at lawyer's point my children's piggybanks. Graciously, he dearly loans us back a bundle when the sun is up. He might do the same with a country's potato crop. He maintains himself from his cuckoo's eggs. Maybe in good housedog fashion he just gives me cheerful companionship to be fed. It is sound goodness in his moonlit mind, to have the advertising agents talk sickness, envy, fear into my mind. He might discreetly plant a hungry flea under my pants. Later he will have his salesman with the remedy drop by. He ridicules my inborn shame and soon after sells me a condom. He is the fox that charms the crow to sing and drop its prey. In our sullen routine of a working day he is the cheerleading storyteller, swinger, attention snatcher, pocketing discreetly the best morsels for pay while I gape in awe or joy. He might be just a patient friend who hears me out to earn his day. Such seem the unobstructed freeways life has allotted to his joys.

There is no doubt, this magician has also been sent to me just as another adventurer to test me, to tease out and mobilize what great spirits I have never guessed are dormant in me. Should I be mad at this fine teacher from whom there is so much to be learned?

A hardy parasite for every great provider to mop up his surplus, is that not what nature's wisdom recommends? A well-mannered profiteer for the deadly efficient fisher who buries himself in dead fish. A surf bum poet for every overachiever under whose whip the earth is grieving now. Here seems another elusive symbiosis not yet mentioned in The Wonders of Nature book.

There are many such suckling mistletoes that the great spirit wisely plans in our tree to grow. These experimenters in survival probe after every possible bug and fault in us. They drive their roots into my weak spots, into my cowardice, my thoughts that fell asleep, into my warts, fears, cracks and nooks. And they make good use of all these faults. There are those predisposed to simply become filthy rich and to be colleagues to those ants chosen to serve as huge living storage tanks for the ant people's honeydew. What clowns, what imaginative inspectors for our wits, what wonderful fundraisers for our dear and daring projects, what sharpening stones we have here!

Should the Creator have put me in charge of the project to send a species to explore space, I could think of no better suited scenario than this perverted, overpopulated, hyperrational, gadget- and grandeur-loving, adolescent-minded human society, with all its hilarious and abominable trimmings - orgasms by phone and all - which is replacing now my old idyllic home.

The more I find out about how you are made: your health, your pimples and crutches and suspenders, your memories and the holes in them, what you have been told and who are the secret crybabies in your soul, the more I find that the way you live is the best way for you to survive. I wonder whether we are not a little like the raindrops that trickle in puzzling zigzags through all kinds of winds, turbulence and clouds never quite sure they will end up by a dormant nut, in the sea, on a rock, or maybe on my cap.

There is a proud, old Swiss saying, "United, the weak are strong and mighty."

I was conditioned to be a highly rational man and to be proud about that. My sight was lassoed and brought in from dreamtime. It was aimed, focused and ironed out. I became a ray in the most beautiful laser - the laser made of all our mental energy bundled and focus on the need of contemporary man. We found that when our thousand thoughts and two thousand arms are united and bundled into one single beam, a remote free-thinking village will shatter under our attack; it will disintegrate and capitulate. In the grip of our beam its lush fauna of loose thinkers, dreamers and drinkers, April fools, tree watchers and tinkers in all trades who brighten and perfume their homes with homemade folklore, saints, sausages and novel ways of doing things would melt down to maybe one more customer for chain saws, soft drinks or a chain selling fast food for our souls. And soon it will not be allowed to decorate its days with its own brand of tears and joys. It will be taught to grow a cash crop, to be bored in repetitive work, to buy more. That special little tribe will become one more sound that makes the stockmarket sing.

It is the tragedy of many indigenous people that their cultures do not fare better when hit by our consumerism than their immunity system and health fared when first confronted with T.B. or smallpox. I believed that through my education I was a privileged man. Yet is that so? Exposed to soulful people and ecstatic land, I now discover myself to be awkwardly one-sided and rude. I live now among people, many of whom never or barely went to formal school; I live now among the kind of people for whom a subtle disrespect was cultivated in me - and I learn from them! In the counsel of a wise old tree, I feel like a first-grader in a seminar on advanced love. At times I feel I belong to a new breed of cannibals. At other times I see myself as one of the million fluffy clouds of love all loosely peopling the skies, being sucked down into the mental hurricane where we start to center our thoughts just around the ego of mankind and became a trillion kilowatts strong.

When I was bred for producing strictly usable knowledge, my reality became corrupt. Most of my eyes' one hundred million nerve cells were pressed into the search for practicality. I learned a lot about loving the individual - the me, the he, the she and the tree and what can be caught in the net of the "ABCs." I learned little about loving the species of man. I became quite physically blind in regard to the unfocused forms and the mysterious - the life at large or the woods. That's how I became a retarded poet and a superb fisherman. Yet our species developed for its vision so many neurons, it needs not delegate all of them for shadow-effects and other practicalities of workaholic eyes. It can free some nerve cells for a poetic vision with its forms that make sense only on Sabbaths and Sundays, so one can readily see that a man is more than a man. This is acquiring good luxuries to me.

My mind has become obsessed with tool making. It wants now to carve a spoon out of everything it sees. Will I always have to simplify a great spruce to a pile of two-by-fours or a great variety of lifestyles to one mighty economy so that my eyes may shine? Wretched vision, that, among an endless profusion of wonders, can barely see how a handle fits a hammer. Wretched education that produces smooth seedless minds good only for work.

When I am aimed and have a goal am I not half blind? I may be a bleeding bull in the ring furiously going for a cape. My mind is straight. My mind is in a tunnel to that goal and unaware of options left and right.

I made myself a promise: I will scatter my neatly filed bundles of thoughts back into the black soil rich with rot and fluffy with worms.