Afterthoughts on the animal world

“Yet in the alert, warm animal there lies the pain and burden of an enormous sadness. For it too feels the presence of what often overwhelms us: a memory, as if the element we keep pressing toward was once more intimate, more true, and our communion infinitely tender. Here all is distance; there it was breath. After that first home, the second seems ambiguous and drafty”

-Rainer Maria Rilke, “Duino Elegies”