As a former academic and natural history book reviewer I was astonished to discover, on being threatened with a two-month exile to the primary jungles of Borneo, just how fast a man can read.
Powerful as your scholarly instincts may be, there is no matching the strength of that irrational desire to find a means of keeping your head upon your shoulders; of retaining your frontal appendage in its accustomed place; of barring 1700 different species of parasitic worm from your bloodstream and Wagler's pit viper from just about anywhere; of removing small, black, wild-boar ticks from your crutch with minimum discomfort (you do it with Sellotape); of declining to wear a globulating necklace of leeches all day long; of sidestepping amoebic and bacillary dysentery, yellow and blackwater and dengue fevers, malaria, cholera, typhoid, rabies, hepatitis, tuberculosis and the crocodile (thumbs in it's eyes, if you have time, they say).
(from: Into the heart of Borneo)

Es ist gut zu wissen
dass sich aus einem Baum
nicht nur
Krippen
und Särge
herstellen lassen,
sondern auch
Schaukelstühle.

(Michael Augustin, "Das perfekte Glück"; Gedichte; Edition Themmen)