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"During the recent years we have come to think that our new technology
can save us from the inexorable laws of familiarity. By magical modern
machinery we hope to clear the world of its commonplaceness - of its omnipresent
tree sparrows, starlings, and blue jays - and fill it with rare Sutton´s
warblers, ivory-billed woodpeckers, whooping cranes, and rufous hummingbirds.
Every bird-watcher knows how hard it is to reconcile oneself to the fact
that the common birds are the ones most usually seen and that rare birds
are really quite uncommon. Now all of us frustrate ourselves by the
expectation that we can make the exotic an everyday experience (without
it ceasing to be exotic); and can somehow make commonplaceness itself disappear."
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