1. William G.
I don’t want to go to the Zoo any more.
The other night I dreamt of an octopus. He was dark green, almost black, dark tentacles undulating in brown water. Not sure what colour an octopus is really. Found colour photos in two of the books at the shop. One octopus was brown and white, the other was grey, pinky, brown. They change colour it seems. Their eyes are dreadful to look at. I shouldn’t like to be looked at by an octopus no matter how small and harmless it might be. To be stared at by those eyes would be altogether too much for me, would leave me nothing whatever to be. There was a black-and-white photo of octopuses hung up to dry on a pole at Thasos on the Aegean Sea, black against the sky, black bags hanging, black tentacles drooping and drying, behind them the brightness over the sea. They’re related to the chambered nautilus which I’d always thought of only as a shell with nothing in it. But there it was in the book full of tentacles and swimming inscrutably.
–Russell Hoban
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