I’ve spent my life looking for mermaids. And I’ve found them. Oh yes, I’ve found them. I’ve found them in the spaces between stories, in the breaks in the fossil record, and in the oral histories of a hundred civilizations. I don’t think we forgot them on purpose. I think we did it because we had to. These were monsters we could neither fight nor flee. Our only choice, if we wanted to claim the seas and hence the world, was to learn to pretend that they weren’t there. We ignored them out of our daily existence. Only now, when airplanes have freed us from the seas, do we have the luxury of
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