Any time we refer to a certain stone and beautiful or ugly, or see a bee buzzing around a flower and say it's working to make honey for our cunsumption, and even when we speak tenderly to a domestic pet, we're being completely ignorant, given that these flowers and rivers, these automobiles and bees, these books and animals have never needed us and never will; they have their own social structures, so infinitely separate from our own as to as to be forever invisible to us. Which means there's no way for us to converse with an automobile, a book, a nation, a river or a pet, and not because they don't understand us, but because we don't understand them.

The Things We've Seen - Agustín Fernández Mallo