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Happy Read a Terhune Book Day!

apparently i’ve been falsely marked red on shinigami eyes so friendly reminder that extension is literally worse than useless at this point

Once Terhune stood at the grave with an Army general who had expressed the wish to see it. To Terhune’s surprise and apparent embarrassment, the general bared his head. “But after all, he was only a dog,” Terhune said. The general solemnly replied, “Sir, he was a brave soldier.”

Terhune wrote: “Why folds should make pilgrimages to the grave of a dead dog is beyond my understanding. But come they do: and some of them bring sheaves of roses and others weep - this for an animal they never saw in life.”

Yes, Terhune, you really did know why, you did understand, The Visitor thought as he sat there alongside the grave and stuffed his cold hands into his overcoat pockets. You gruff old bastard, with your fake toughness, you understood exactly why they came here and why I come here now and sit like a senile old lady and make a fool of myself, crying in the freezing weather for an animal I never saw. You knew why: Because you made him into some kind of saint, that’s why. Because you took this collie dog and you told stories about his greatness and goodness and love and eternal loyalty, and with your storytelling skill, you made us - all the thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of us - you made us actually fall in love with a damn dog! And he became the dog we always wanted to have and never did. Maybe even more than that - maybe he became the friend we always waited to find, or even the brother, or the father. And this authentic-imaginary dog, whose only real interest in life probably was his next bowl of hamburger, this collie dog took hold of us and won’t let go.

And you, Terhune, express wonder that people want to come see a dog’s grave and you’re probably having a hell of a laugh over it, wherever you are, watching me sit here and do my gray-haired weeping. Except that I know you wept, too.

You pretended not to understand why anyone would want to come visit the grave of an animal, but you made sure to bury him right there in that little sun-strewn hollow where he loved to lie when he lived… right there alongside the house, so he could keep watching over it and so you could glance out at him every now and again and smile a silent greeting.

You understood, you old fake. You know.

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

JANE GOODALL

so actually i misspoke earlier — trans women are absolutely treated as women. we are treated as the women of women. We are the people cis women treat like cis men treat them. we are the class of people treated as a lesser to them, a malformed version of them. And when we ask to be treated as equals, or even just get a fucking token character, scraps, crumbs, from the people who fought hard for their own scraps for years, we are treated as hysterical, self-obsessed harpies. Why can’t trans women just make their own thing? Stop demanding cis women’s stuff be about trans women :/ Ugh you bitches complain about everything why can’t you just enjoy it? It just wouldn’t be realistic if it was a trans woman.

But we didn't know WHAT those specific genes in pea plants were exactly, we just knew how they were transmitted and expressed, we were the exact same as Mendel after all this time