Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed quick to extinction. Where this is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don't, that the sounds of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness.
What then? A few of the little amphibians will continue their metamorphosis by way of the nerves and tissues of one of the higher animals, in which process the joy of one becomes the contentment of the second. Nothing is lost, except an individual consciousness here and there, a trivial perhaps even illusory phenomenon. The rest survive, mate, multiply, burrow, estivate, dream and rise again. The rains will come, the potholes shall be filled. Again. And again. And again.
I love, "where there is no joy there can be no courage." I love this book.
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