mirror glass darkly: jack london

"I am no attic singer, no ballroom warbler.  And why?  Because i am practical.  Mine is no squalor of song that cannot transmite itself, with proper exchange value, into a flower-crowned cottage, a sweet mountain-meadow, a grove of redwoods, an orchard of thirty-seven trees, one long row of blackberries and two short rows of strawberries, to say nothing of a quarter mile of gurgling brook."

-from "brown wolf" by Jack London

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He did not complain.  It was the way of life, and it was just.  He had been born close to the earth, close to the earth had he lived, and the law thereof was not new to him.  It was the law of all flesh.  Nature was not kindly to the flesh.  She had no concern for that concrete thing called the individual.  Her interest lay in the species, the race.  This was the deepest abstraction old koskoosh's barbaric mind was capable of, but he grasped it firmly.  He saw it exemplified in all life.  The rise of the sap, the bursting greenness of the willow bud, the fall of the yellow leaf--in this alone was told the whole history.

-"the law of life" Jack London