The vast majority of individual termites, belonging to the most highly evolved species, never leave their crowded fortress city, could not see anything if they did, spend their entire existence in the narrow chambers and narrower tunnels of a labyrinth where they were born and where they breathe perpetually the damp, carbon dioxide atmosphere and dread more than anything else being compelled to leave it, even for an instant. The lives of certain human city dwellers who spend their days in air-conditioned offices, pass from them through tunnels of the subway to narrow chambers in some housing development, may seem remotely analogous.
ATTRIBUTION:
Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970), U.S. author, editor. “Men, Apes, and Termites,” ...and even if you do..., Morrow (1968).
