"...this is the natural law of maintaining distance this is the natural law of loneliness in the crowd and the water foamed now slashed to snippets swarming with dagger fins and somewhere in the margins he was compelled to the detacheable calm of his greatness with the fish and ever so slowly they fell in line from head to tail and for the first time you recognized the ning, the string extending from the back of your neck to the bottom of your soul, and you listened in wonder to the steady hum as on and on it drew you lonely in the crowd of the lonely and the silent and you were filled with a strange sudden joy...."
The movements of large flocks of animals have always fascinated mankind. What mystic force makes a collective moving fast and close to eachother suddenly disintegrate to separate individuals, finding their own paths within a wider space, but still dependent on oneanother?
In his novel "see under: love", David Grossmann describes a man who joins a shoal of salmon on its way through the oceans. He swims, eats and sleeps together with them, and gradually he understands the forces that make this large group of individuals swim almost as one body. One of these forces is a cohesive, joining force called ning.