“Don’t ever think that magic is simply somebody taking a rabbit out of a hat. Our ancestors believed in magic and were right for the wrong reasons — for the most part they believed that magic was evil, not good. But the magic that lies all about you, from your own body to that of an elephant, to a fly’s wing as intricate as anything that lets the sunlight into Chartres Cathedral, to the great surging sea itself — that is magic. Anyone who goes through life unastounded by everything he sees is not alive.” — Gerald Durrell, Myself and Other Animals (2024), “Fragments from unpublished autobiography”