From another world

"The birds whose lives are the most remote from human knowledge are those that spend far from land in the wastes of ocean. Even when they come to land for breeding, as they must, it may be only at night, and then only to disappear into underground burrows or fissures of rock."

"The sense of mystery in man is, in the first instance, only an expression of his own ignorance ; but secondarily it may be the expression of how great, beyond human comprehension, the world is. Most of us are so preoccupied with our immediate lives and surroundings that, especially if we live only in cities, we are unaware of all the time and space beyond. There are urgent and wholly absorbing questions of politics, of economic production and trade, of social strife. Philosophers who could well have been born in the cafés of Paris, where they spend their lives, proclaim the doctrine that the worlds is man's world, that he is the sole creator of any order in it. They can see that this is so simply looking about them, just as the bee that remains in the hive can, by looking about, see that what it inhabits is a bee-made world.

The Storm Petrel knows our human world only incidentally and along its outermost fringes. In the wide oceans by day and night it sometimes sees a ship passing and follows it, as it would follow a whale, for what it finds in its wake ; or it sees an airplane crossing from horizon to horizon ; but I would guess that it atatches as little importance to them as the philosopher does to the world outside the city. It knows nothing about man's creation of the world. In its views, the land areas of the earth, on which man works his will, constitute mere rim for the one great ocean that envelops the globe. Even where the birds of Mousa nest, skuas must seem more important than men.

Nevertheless, there is an association, however tenuous. Thousands of years ago, men whom the Parisian philosopher must acknowledge as his forerunners built the abandoned bastion in which these insignificant creatures of the wild continue secretly, year after year, to bring forth their new generations, bedore they return to the untrodden ocean that, if they were philsophers, they would proclaim as the one and only reality."

The Storm Petrel and The Owl of Athena, Louis J. Halle, I, From another world.