... that book:
'Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.'
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)
Thanks Enno for leaving books next to the toilet although the habit of reading while 4 other people might need the bathroom is not a good one ;)
I lost that habit with having an outhouse...
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't have a problem not continuing with this habit if I only could be in Alaska and have an outhouse (not a coughing one though).
ReplyDeleteI don't spend more time on the toilet because of the books, just more productive time.
ReplyDeleteI just checked in my catalog: http://flickr.com/photos/enno/2443881126/
I've got that book, I'll tell Alke to unearth it from my library in her basement and you can read it after Christmas.