Thoreau &
Mosquitoes

I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment in earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang fame.

It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and the Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting fertility and vigor of the world.

--- From Walden
Henry David Thoreau