Of course we are challenging nature itself, and, it hits back…. We have to accept that it’s much stronger than we are. —Werner Herzog
Watching this captive bear playing with a plucky domestic cat in the rustic confines of a mean Russian hunting camp, I thought of Werner Herzog—especially his documentary Grizzly Man (2005), about bear advocate Timothy Treadwell and the dangers of sentimentalizing nature. But I also think of poet Randall Jarrell’s luminous novel The Animal Family, which tells the story of a hunter and a mermaid making an unlikely family with a bear and a lynx. The strange zoology of Jarrell’s feral family never seems sentimental—or maybe it’s a reminder that sentiment, as much as savagery, is also a survival instinct. —via Neatorama
