For a real glimpse into an almost vanished world, one should look…at a scorpion who so obviously has no business lingering into the twentieth century. He is not shaped like a spider and he has too many legs to be an insect. Plainly, he is a discontinued model–still running but very difficult, one imagines, to get spare parts for.
–Joseph Wood Krutch, The Desert Year
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That’s wonderful. I’m reminded a bit of Ogden Nash: “It jeers at fish unfossilized / as intellectual snobs elite / old Coelacanth, so unrevised / it doesn’t know it’s obsolete.”
As a desert rat myself, I have added this one to my “To Read” list.