Borland, Hal
Give any man a star on which he can fix his eye and he can reach as far as his imagination points the way. An American Year, 1946.
Hal Borland is a native Nebraskan. He grew up in Colorado, traveled widely, and retired to rural Connecticut where he lives with his author-wife Barbara Dodge Borland. For many years he wrote a nature-oriented essay for The New York Times Sunday editorial page. He is also the author of The Amulet; This Hill, This Valley, and High, Wide and Lonesome.
There is a fundamental need in man to know three things: who he is, where he lives, and what time it is. With satisfying answers to those three questions, most of us could live in relative peace with the world and ourselves. The Enduring Pattern, 1959.
Life persists, and so does its ultimate source, call it what you will. Man is a unique form of that life, but not alien to it. He happens to live in the midst of life on this earth, this particular small unit of a universe about which he actually has only a smattering of knowledge. Ibid.
We are the survivors, all of us, not of a man-made holocaust but of infinitely more powerful and enduring forces, the surge of life, the rhythm of change, and the infinity of time. Ibid.
The year holds one moment, which may last for a week, when tree and bush and vine are on the breathless verge of leafing out. Borland Country, 1971.
Blond October comes striding over the hills wearing a crimson shirt and faded green trousers. Ibid.
We carry the ocean within us and we perish without water. Ibid.
When I consider the bland assumption that the world was made for man, I wonder if my dog doesn't believe I was put here just to feed and house him and make him reasonably comfortable. Ibid.
Deprive us of air, or remove the oxygen from the air for a few hours, and we would become a vanished species. Ibid.
The conquest of America was accompanied and even paced by the rhythm of the ax. Ibid.
Some naturalists put the number of insect species at more than 600,000, ten or fifteen times the number of known species of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals combined; others put the number still higher, around 750,000. Ibid.
An insect is an air-breathing animal with three body parts, head, thorax and abdomen, one pair of antennae, and six legs. A spider is also an air-breathing creature, but it has only two body parts, a cephalothorax and an abdomen, it has no antennae, and it has eight legs. Ibid.
Insects are prodigal with energy. The bumblebee would seem to be too big and awkward to fly on its comparatively small wings, but by beating them at the rate of 240 strokes to the second it accomplishes the seemingly impossible. Ibid.
. . . one of the birds' inalienable rights, one of their finest evidences that they are no longer reptiles, is their power of song. Ibid.