"How much do you know about Elephants?"
"Not too much."
"Not too much a little? Or not too much nothing?
"Hardly anything."
"For example, did you know that scientists used to think that elephants had esp?"
"Do you mean ESP?"
"Anyway, elephants can set up meetings from very faraway locations, and they know where their friends and enemies are going to be, and they can find water without any geological clues. No one could figure out exactly how they do all of those things. So, what's actually going on?"
"I don't know."
"How do they do it?"
"It?"
"How do they set if meetings if they don't have E.S.P?"
"You're asking me?"
"Yes."
"I don't know."
"Do you want to know?"
"Sure."
"A lot?"
"Sure."
"They're making very, very, very deep calls, way deeper than what humans can hear. They're talking to each other. Isn't that so awesome?"
"It is."


I ate a strawberry, "There's this woman who's spent the last couple of years in the Congo or whatever. She's been making recordings of the calls and putting together an enormous library of them. This past year she started playing them back."
"Playing them back?"
"To the elephants."
"Why?" I loved that she asked why.
"As you probably know, elephants have much,much stronger memories than other mammals."
"Yes. I think I knew that."
"So this woman wanted to see how just how good their memories really are. She'd play a call of an enemy that was recorded a bunch of years earlier- a call they'd heard only once- and they'd get panicky and sometimes they'd run. They remembered hundreds of calls. Thousands. There might not even be a limit. Isn't that fascinating?"
"It is."
"Because what's really fascinating is that she'd play the call of a dead elephant to its family members. "
"And?"
"They remembered."
"What did they do?"
"They approached the speaker."

"I wonder what they were feeling."
"What do you mean?"
"When they heard the calls of their dead, was it with love that they approached the jeep? Or fear? Or anger?"
"I don't remember."

-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.








One of my favourite excerpts so far from the novel. It is such a beautiful book, but I think that (at least so far) I prefer Foer's Everything Is Illuminated. But I was dying to show somebody this part of the book, because it is so beautiful and potent and heartbreaking, really, you have to read this part of the book to feel exactly what I'm talking about.
By the way, I've been doodling a lot lately, and I think that I may be coming out of artblock. I'll upload one of my more detailed pictures after I finish it. (:


-Alice.