2025-07-13 22:19:25
In the late summer of 1832, England was set aflame with wonder — a glimpse of something wild and flamboyant, shimmering with the lush firstness of a world untrammeled by the boot of civilization.
Edward Lear (May 12, 1812–January 29, 1888), barely out of his teens, had been working on his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots for two years. Moved by the young man’s talent and passion, one of William Turner’s patrons — a wealthy woman with a deep feeling for nature and art — had procured for him an introduction to the newly opened London Zoo, which had denied other artists access. Lear spent endless hours at the parrot house. When the zoo closed, he dashed across Regent’s Park to the museum of the London Zoological Society and continued drawing.
In a letter to a friend penned at the feverish outset of the project, he is already becoming himself — passionate and playful, part Humboldt, part Lewis Carroll, entirely original, prototyping the nonsense verse he would be remembered for:
For all day I’ve been away at the West End,
Painting the best end
Of some vast Parrots
As red as new carrots
Birds had always been Lear’s great enchantment, the bellows to stoke the fire of his love of life. Parrots were special — “live emeralds,” he wrote in his diary, emissaries of “the sense of freshness and freedom” he found in wild nature and craved ferociously in London’s gilded cage. To render them true to life was to contact his own wildness. He couldn’t bear to draw from “skins” and “specimens” — dead husks explorers brought back from expeditions for scientists to study life — so he spent small eternities waiting for the living birds at the zoo to perch at the perfect angle and hold the pose long enough for him to begin sketching.
Jenny Uglow — one of my favorite custodians of cultural hindsight — describes his process in her magnificent biography Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense (public library):
At the zoo, he measured wingspan, length and legs while the young keeper Goss held the birds still. He chose their most striking, defining pose (and in his paintings they do seem to pose), then he sketched them — perched on branches, preening, nodding and blinking at the artist before them — in countless rough drawings, surrounded by jotted notes. He caught the arc of movement and the tilt of heads and drew their graduated feathers and soft down with painstaking accuracy, noting the smallest gradations of colour and texture. He made test sheets of colour, dabbing the tints around the sketches as a guide. But he also gave the birds character: the green and red Kuhl’s parakeets seem to talk to each other; the salmon-crested cockatoo appears blushingly vain; the great red and yellow macaw turns its head with a wary, arrogant glance and the blue and yellow macaw leans forward, its feathers ruffled and high. It is hard to tell who is the observer, artist or bird.
Parrots saturated what Lear most relished in nature. Color poured from his brush, alive with the same feeling-tone he found during his long walks in the forests of the Lake District, marveling in his journal at “the emerald blue deep beneath, the pale blue beyond.” He envisioned making a ravishing book of his birds, emanating all the vastness and vibrancy of life itself.
But the processes for reproducing such bright colors and printing such large folios were cumbersome and expensive. No publisher would take the risk. So, a century after William Blake pioneered the artist-entrepreneur model of self-publishing, Lear decided to crowdfund and self-publish his labor of love: He would produce 175 copies for subscribers at ten shillings each, then use the proceeds to publish a bound book for the public. He began offering subscriptions to old friends and neighbors, parents of his former students, dukes and duchesses, eminent naturalists, and even the president of the Linnaean Society, hoping they would become seed investors in his vision.
The lavish large-format art he envisioned was modeled on Audubon’s pioneering “elephant folio” of Birds of America, published five years earlier after fourteen years of struggle. Lear — who was around the age of Audubon’s sons — had befriended the American artist during his European lecture tour and had become especially close with one of his sons. When Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots was finally published as a bound book, Audubon bought a copy and wrote admiringly about it in his journal.
But the unexampled is always at odds with the commonplace, the visionary always at odds with the commodity: Commercially, the book was a dismal failure. Creatively, it changed the course of natural history illustration and paved the way for the future of book art; it changed the course of Lear’s life — the unknown young man was soon tutoring the young Queen Victoria in painting and working for the eminent taxidermist turned ornithological writer John Gould, whose gifted wife Elizabeth also trained with Lear to become one of the world’s greatest ornithological artists herself. (Her birds were even more joyous to work with than Audubon’s in my divinations project.)
Perhaps Lear’s parrots are so striking, so alive, because he was always in an I-Thou relationship with the birds. The drawings that filled his room spoke to him: “A huge Maccaw is now looking me in the face as much as to say — ‘finish me,’” he wrote to a friend; they spoke the language of his soul:
The whole of my exalted & delightful upper tenement in fact overflows with them, and for the last 12 months I have so moved — looked at, — & existed among Parrots — that should any transmigration take place at my decease I am sure my soul would be very uncomfortable in anything but one of the Psittacidae.
Every artist’s art is their coping mechanism for being alive. The parrots were not just an aesthetic passion for Lear. “A deep black bitter melancholy destroys me,” he wrote in his journal. Just as Marianne North turned loneliness and loss into wonder with her pioneering paintings of exotic plants and Ernst Haeckel turned the deepest heartbreak into enchantment with his breathtaking drawings of jellyfish, Lear painted what he saw in order to keep looking out. All melancholy is a stranglehold of selfing. All joy is a surrender to something larger than oneself. In nature, in wildness, Lear came unselved, so that he could gasp in his journal after a day of walking in the forest and sketching: “Is it not wonderful to be alive?”
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-07-12 10:32:52
Prediction is the sharpest tool the human animal has devised — the chisel with which we sculpted survival out of chance, the fulcrum by which we lifted civilization out of survival. Among the greatest gifts of the imagination, that crowning curio of consciousness, is our ability to alchemize hindsight into foresight, to chart the most probable course of the future by drawing on our experience of the past. And yet, like the tragic flaw of the Greek hero, our great strength is also our great vulnerability. It is salutary to remember how often our predictions have been wrong, how again and again they have withheld entire regions of reality from us as we have continually mistaken the known for the knowable, our ways of knowing for the path to truth.
The shape of the Earth.
The organizing principle of the Solar System.
The bat.
If we fed what we know about mammalian anatomy and the physics of avian flight into a predictive algorithm, it would fail to produce a flying mammal. In theory, which is how we model reality in the mind, bats should not exist. And yet every evening, all over the world, winged improbabilities scribble across the gloaming sky their stenography of the possible.
Metabolism is what makes all life possible and the metabolic engine of animals hinges on breathing — hemoglobin carries oxygen from the lungs throughout the bloodstream, where it reacts with sugar from food to produce energy. Our mammalian lungs resemble a bagpipe that inflates with each inhale of oxygen and deflates with each exhale of carbon dioxide. Birds have an entirely different respiratory system — air sacs acting as bellows move oxygen through the pipe-like lungs during both inhalation and exhalation. This unidirectional air flow allows birds to fly across great distances at high altitudes where the oxygen concentration is low.
Bats have mammalian lungs. They should not be able to fly. And yet they do, their flight more metabolically efficient than that of hummingbirds. Ranging in size from the lightest known mammal — the tiny Craseonycteris thonglongyai, weighing a mere 2 grams — to the Asian flying fox with its 2-meter wingspan, they have adapted to extreme environments thanks to their virtuosic oxygen and carbon dioxide regulation.
A study of Chile’s eight species of bats found that they have a respiratory area sixfold that of other mammals and lung volumes 72% greater. Their heart — the transport system for oxygen in the blood — is larger than that of any other mammal relative to body size. At rest, their breathing rate is similar to ours. But as soon as they take flight, it increases up to seventeen-fold, reaching as many as 400 breaths per minute synchronized with their wing beat frequency to minimizing energy expenditure by combining muscle contractions. These almost supernatural lungs are sheathed in a blood-gas barrier much thinner than that of other animals, allowing oxygen to enter the bloodstream rapidly, disposing of carbon dioxide just as rapidly.
This respiratory and cardiovascular ingenuity allows bats to conserve energy during cold periods, not paying the metabolic cost of generating body heat that other mammals would — they are among Earth’s few true hibernators, capable of dropping their heartbeat sixteen-fold and their temperature to that of the cave walls that encastle them in their kingdom of darkness.
These astonishing adaptations are the sum total of myriad small defiances of prediction — chances taken on the improbable and the untested, wild guesses at the shape of the possible — without which bats would not exist. But they do, and we need them. We need bats — “swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together,” D.H. Lawrence called them — for the same reason we need apricots and lichen and the great blue heron: to remind us that the universe could have remained one homogenous sea of matter swimming in light, for nothing in the laws of physics demands that the world be beautiful or could predict the dazzling diversity of forms that makes it so. The bat is just as defiant of prediction as the Big Bang — small winged evidence that the possible is always vaster than the probable and the imagination of life is always greater than that of the living.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-07-08 02:05:06
I once asked ChatGPT to write a poem about a total solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a dozen couplets of cliches that touched nothing, changed nothing in me. The AI had the whole of the English language at its disposal — a lexicon surely manyfold the poet’s — and yet Whitman could conjure up cosmoses of feeling with a single line, could sculpt from the commonest words an image so dazzlingly original it stops you up short, spins you around, leaves the path of your thought transformed.
An AI may never be able to write a great poem — a truly original poem — because a poem is made not of language but of experience, and the defining aspect of human experience is the constant collision between our wishes and reality, the sharp violation of our expectations, the demolition of our plans.
We call this suffering.
Suffering is the price we pay for a consciousness capable of love and the loss of love, of hope and the devastation of hope. Because suffering, like consciousness itself, is a full-body phenomenon — glands secreting fear, nerves conducting loneliness, neurotransmitters recoiling with regret — a disembodied pseudo-consciousness is fundamentally incapable of suffering and that transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art: An algorithm will never know anything beyond the execution of its programmed plan; it is fundamentally spared the failure of its aims because failure can never be the successful execution of the command to fail.
We create — poems and paintings, stories and songs — to find a language for the bewilderment of being alive, the failure of it, the fulness of it, and to have lived fully is not to have spared yourself.
In his exquisite reckoning with what makes life worth living, Nobel laureate Elias Canetti captures this in a diary entry from the late spring of 1942. Under the headline “very necessary qualifications for a good Persian storyteller,” he copies out a passage from an unidentified book he is reading:
In addition to having read all the known books on love and heroism, the teller of stories must have suffered greatly for love, have lost his beloved, drunk much good wine, wept with many in their sorrow, have looked often upon death and have learned much about birds and beasts. He must also be able to change himself into a beggar or a caliph in the twinkling of an eye.
A generation before Canetti, the philosopher-poet Rainer Maria Rilke articulated the same essential condition for creativity in his only novel, reflecting on what it takes to compose a great poem, but speaking to what it takes to create anything of beauty and substance, anything drawn from one life to touch another:
For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one has long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars — and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.
Couple with Carl Jung on the relationship between suffering and creativity, then revisit Annie Dillard on creativity and what it takes to be a great writer and Oliver Sacks, writing thirty years before ChatGPT, on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-07-05 00:18:37
One of the most important things to have learned in life is that choosing joy in a world rife with reasons for despair is a countercultural act of courage and resistance, choosing it not despite the abounding sorrow we barely survive but because of it, because joy — like music, like love — is one of those entirely unnecessary miracles of consciousness that give meaning to survival with its bright allegiance to the most alive part of us.
“We’ve all had too much sorrow — now is the time for joy,” Nick Cave sings in one of my favorite songs, and yet in a world trembling with fear and cynicism (which is the most cowardly species of fear), joy — the choice of it, the right to it — is in need of constant defense.
I know none mightier or more delightful than the one Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) mounts in his poem “Defensa de la alegría” (“A Defense of Joy”), read here by the polymathic Chilean primatologist Isabel Behncke (who introduced me to this benediction of a poem) followed by my English translation and reading to the sound of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 4 in E-flat Major.
DEFENSA DE LA ALEGRÍA
Mario BenedettiDefender la alegría como una trinchera
defenderla del escándalo y la rutina
de la miseria y los miserables
de las ausencias transitorias
y las definitivasdefender la alegría como un principio
defenderla del pasmo y las pesadillas
de los neutrales y de los neutrones
de las dulces infamias
y los graves diagnósticosdefender la alegría como una bandera
defenderla del rayo y la melancolía
de los ingenuos y de los canallas
de la retórica y los paros cardiacos
de las endemias y las academiasdefender la alegría como un destino
defenderla del fuego y de los bomberos
de los suicidas y los homicidas
de las vacaciones y del agobio
de la obligación de estar alegresdefender la alegría como una certeza
defenderla del óxido y la roña
de la famosa pátina del tiempo
del relente y del oportunismo
de los proxenetas de la risadefender la alegría como un derecho
defenderla de dios y del invierno
de las mayúsculas y de la muerte
de los apellidos y las lástimas
del azar
y también de la alegría.
A DEFENSE OF JOY
by Mario Benedetti
translated by Maria PopovaDefend joy like a trench
defend it from scandal and routine
from misery and misers
from truancies passing
and permanentdefend joy as a principle
defend it from bewilderments and bad dreams
from the neutral and the neutron
from sweet infamies
and grave diagnosesdefend joy like a flag
defend it from lightning and melancholy
from the fools and the frauds
from rhetoric and ruptures of the heart
from the endemic and the academicdefend joy as a destiny
defend it from fire and firefighters
from suicides and homicides
from vacations and ruts
from the obligation to be joyfuldefend joy as a certainty
defend it from rust and smut
from the famous patina of time
from dew and exploitation
by the pimps of laughterdefend joy as a right
defend it from God and winter
from uppercase and the casket
from surnames and the pity
of chance
and of joy too.
Couple with the story behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” then revisit Benedetti’s wakeup call of a poem “Do Not Spare Yourself” (“No te salves”).
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-07-03 02:41:20
“One must be a seer, make oneself a seer,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.” As more and more of our senses are being amputated by the blade of our image-centric culture, reducing the vast and delicate sensorium of human experience — moss on a rock, a salty summer evening at the ocean’s edge, a lover’s kiss — to a purely visual representation on a two-dimensional screen, it matters all the more that we train our vision to see beyond the veneer of the visible.
It is hardly surprising, given the co-evolution of vision and consciousness, that how we look at the world — what we choose to bring into consciousness — shapes what we see, which in turn shapes the world we make in the image of our vision. This is why we call visionaries the people who see sides and paths others do not, who catch in the prism of their consciousness the light of the world invisible to the rest and cast it back magnified, more luminous, iridescent with possibility.
The pioneering modernist poet H.D. (September 10, 1886–September 27, 1961) was such a person, and one who saw deeply into the nature of the prism itself, who located the seer’s vision not in the mind but in what she called the “over-mind.”
Born in Pennsylvania as Hilda Doolittle, the daughter of an astronomer who liked to say that “his one girl was worth all his five boys put together,” she grew up watching her father magnify stars through his telescope and her grandfather — a marine biologist — magnify cells under his microscope. Here were layers of reality, bright and dazzling, beyond what was visible to the eye, lavishing with wonder those who have the right instruments. Such an experience at so formative an age can’t but reveal the mind itself as an instrument for gaging reality, its lens polished by our experience, its focus the making and unmaking of our lives, and all of it, all of it, not above the body but of it. H.D. would devote her life to undoing the damage Descartes has done to our cultural mythos, insisting instead on the synthesis of body and mind, of spirituality and sexuality, of love and reason.
In 1919, catatonic with grief in the aftermath of a miscarriage and a world war that had slain both her father and her brother, having barely survived the Spanish Flu herself, H.D. took refuge on the Scilly Islands on her way to Greece with her newborn baby and the woman who would become her partner for the remainder of her life — the novelist, poet, and magazine editor Bryher. There amid the lapping blue waves and lush subtropical gardens of a natural world so breathtaking it seems almost supernatural, enveloped in her lover’s intellectual kinship and passionate devotion, she started coming back to life. And, as such resuscitations of élan vital tend to do, some inner veil lifted one day to leave her feeling a profound participancy in the streaming life of the universe. At the center of it was a revelation about the nature of vision, which H.D. recorded in a series of shamanic diary fragments published long after her death as Notes on Thought and Vision (public library).
She identifies three “states or manifestations of life” — the body, the mind, and the “over-mind,” bearing echoes of Emerson’s notion of the “Oversoul,” that faculty for contacting what the transcendentalists’ hero Goethe called “the All.” The highest achievement of human development, she observes, is “equilibrium, balance, growth of the three at once” — a brain without embodiment is “a disease comparable to cancerous growth or tumor” (what a prophetic indictment of AI), a body without a mind is “an empty fibrous bundle of glands,” and an over-mind without the other two is madness. A healthy body, therefore, is not a conglomeration of certain parts, abilities, and attributes, but a harmonious integration with the mind, just as a healthy mind is not a checklist of cognitive capacities but a harmonious integration with the body, and out of these twin harmonies arises the vision of the over-mind.
Swimming in the cerulean womb of the world, she finds a metaphor — or a metaphor finds her — for the essence of the over-mind:
That over-mind seems a cap, like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body, contained in a definite space. It is like a closed sea-plant, jellyfish, or anemone.
Into that over-mind, thoughts pass and are visible like fish swimming under clear water.
The over-mind is the superorganism of the psyche, pulsating with “super-feelings”:
These feelings extend out and about us; as the long, floating tentacles of the jellyfish reach out and about him. They are not of different material, extraneous, as the physical arms and legs are extraneous to the gray matter of the directing brain. The super-feelers are part of the super-mind, as the jellyfish feelers are the jellyfish itself, elongated in fine threads.
This over-mind is capable of two kinds of vision, which must also be in equilibrium for us to reach our existential potential. A decade before Virginia Woolf insisted that the highest form of mind is “the androgynous mind… resonant and porous… naturally creative, incandescent and undivided,” H.D. writes:
Vision is of two kinds — vision of the womb and vision of the brain. In vision of the brain, the region of consciousness is above and about the head; when the centre of consciousness shifts and the jellyfish is in the body… we have vision of the womb or love-vision.
The majority of dream and of ordinary vision is of the womb.
The brain and the womb are both centers of consciousness, equally important.
Lamenting that the creative culture of her time was already suffering from the debilitating brain bias that only metastasized in our own era, she shines an optimistic gleam into the future:
I believe there are artists coming in the next generation, some of whom will have the secret of using their over-minds.
But nothing feeds the over-mind more, nothing reveals it and anneals it more, than love. The world deepens and broadens and begins to shimmer when we are in love precisely because the experience embodies us and enminds us at the same time, touching the total person with its light. Surely drawing on her experience of falling in love with Bryher, which had come unbidden like a rainbow after a summer storm, H.D. considers how this happens:
We begin with sympathy of thought.
The minds of the two lovers merge, interact in sympathy of thought.
The brain, inflamed and excited by this interchange of ideas, takes on its character of over-mind, becomes… a jellyfish, placed over and about the brain.
The love-region is excited by the appearance or beauty of the loved one, its energy not dissipated in physical relation, takes on its character of mind, becomes this womb-brain or love-brain… a jellyfish in the body.
The love-brain and over-brain are both capable of thought. This thought is vision… The over-mind is like a lens of an opera-glass. When we are able to use this over-mind lens, the whole world of vision is open to us… The love-mind and the over-mind are two lenses. When these lenses are properly adjusted, focused, they bring the world of vision into consciousness. The two work separately, perceive separately, yet make one picture.
There are many portals into “the world of over-mind consciousness” and we must each find our own. Echoing Whitman’s insistence that “no one can acquire for another… grow for another” and Nietzsche’s admonition that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” H.D. writes:
My sign-posts are not yours, but if I blaze my own trail, it may help to give you confidence and urge you to get out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world, the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts.
But the world of the great creative artists is never dead.
All it takes to recreate the old stale world, she insists, are just a few creative kindreds who entwine their vision:
Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead, murky thought.
Two or three people gathered together in the name of truth, beauty, over-mind consciousness could bring the whole force of this power back into the world.
Couple H.D.’s Notes on Thought and Vision with Georgia O’Keeffe on the art of seeing and Iris Murdoch — whose over-mind was deeply kindred to H.D.’s — on how to see more clearly and love more purely, then revisit Lewis Thomas’s magnificent living metaphor for unselfing drawn from the enchanted symbiosis of a jellyfish and a sea slug.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-06-30 08:23:47
“The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” wrote Milton in Paradise Lost. Because the mind (which may in the end be a full-body phenomenon) is the cup that lifts the world to our lips to be tasted — a taste we call reality — it is difficult to examine the cup itself, to observe the inner workings of the mind as it sips questions and turns them over with the tongue of thought to form ideas, to render a world. We can’t will it, because the will is a handmaiden of the mind; we can only surrender to it, and never willingly, when something unexpected — a grave illness, a great loss, a great love — vanquishes the tranquilizing effect of habit, jolts us awake from the trance of near-living, and makes us see reality afresh, purified and magnified.
No one, to my mind, has articulated those vivifying interruptions more powerfully — or more delightfully — than William Henry Hudson (August 4, 1841–August 18, 1922).
Born in Argentina as Guillermo Enrique Hudson, he lost his mother when he was only a teenager. Darwin had just published On the Origin of Species. The disconsolate boy devoured it immediately — it must have been a salve, this beautiful and brutal model of nature in which the survival of the species is perfected by the deaths of individuals. Like the young John James Audubon, who turned to birds in the wake of losing his own mother, Hudson — who would eventually become the Audubon of the pampas — grew passionately interested in ornithology. He resented the way science was done, killing living birds to make “skins” for study; he resented the way civilization was done, destroying wildlife habitats for human needs. He felt the urgency and ecstasy of a calling — to enchant the world with the wondrous birds of Patagonia he had spent his youth observing, taking meticulous notes about their morphology, habits, and migration patterns, thinking constantly about what it is like to be a creature so profoundly other.
In his early thirties, Hudson sailed for England, eager to share what he knew of a feathered universe entirely alien to the European mind.
He reached out to John Gould — the Old World’s preeminent ornithologist, a disaffected taxidermist who had risen to fame largely thanks to his wife’s extraordinary ornithological art — and received a curt rejection.
Unable to find work, he folded his gaunt six-foot frame into a giant origami bird to sleep on the benches of Hyde Park.
It took him two years to get a paying job as a writer — for a women’s magazine, under the pseudonym Maud Merryweather. He wrote the way he felt the living world — passionately, rigorously, his tender curiosity shimmering with awe.
Doors began to crack open and he was soon writing for other small journals. For fifteen years, he trojan-horsed birds into popular interest stories, until he finally published his first book of ornithology, about the birds of Argentina. He was forty-seven.
Then the floodgates opened and out came pouring some of the most breathtaking nature writing our civilization has produced. Hemingway cited Hudson in his novels. Joseph Conrad marveled that his prose was “like the grass that the good God made to grow and when it was there you could not tell how it came.” By the end of Hudson’s life, his collected works — dozens of ornithological books and natural history essays, novels and travelogues, written with a philosopher’s quickening of mind and poet’s sensitivity to the light of the world — amounted to twenty-four volumes.
Shortly after his death, he was honored with a bird sanctuary memorial in his name in Hyde Park, not far from the bench that had held his dreams as a homeless young writer.
What shaped Hudson’s gift for channeling the beating heart of nature, for rendering the living world in such exultant and exacting detail, was the ruin of his best laid plans — an accident that befell him in Patagonia just before he left Argentina for good. Pulsating through it is the reminder that every loss of control is an invitation to surrender, and it is only in surrender that we break out of our stories to contact a deeper truth — about ourselves, about the world, about the interchange between the two that we call reality.
Not long after turning thirty, determined to make a name for himself as an ornithologist, Hudson set out on a yearlong observing expedition from the pampas to Tierra del Fuego, across the austere scrub and cold canyons of the Patagonian desert. Recounting the experience a lifetime later in his altogether magnificent 1893 book Idle Days in Patagonia (public domain), he reflects on the spirit in which he entered upon the adventure:
To my mind there is nothing in life so delightful as that feeling of relief, of escape, and absolute freedom which one experiences in a vast solitude, where man has perhaps never been, and has, at any rate, left no trace of his existence.
But things did not go as planned from the outset. The southbound steamer he boarded in Buenos Aires ran aground in the middle of the second night. Hudson awoke to find himself beached on the Patagonian coast. Too restless to wait for rescue, he decided to trek inland in search of human habitation, which the octogenarian captain had assured him was near.
After two days of walking, without provisions or a map, he came upon a gasp of a vista — the Rio Negro river snaking across the desert, “broader than the Thames at Westminster, and extending away on either hand until it melted and was lost in the blue horizon, its low shores clothed in all the glory of groves and fruit orchards and vineyards and fields of ripening maize.”
He eventually made it to a farmhouse laden with fruit that “glowed like burning coals in the deep green foliage.” After replenishing his energies, he set out on the first leg of the expedition proper — an eighty-mile ride along the river — accompanied by a young Englishman.
They stopped midway at a “rude little cabin,” in “a dreary and desolate spot, with a few old gaunt and half-dead red willows for only trees.” One hot afternoon, bored and birdless, Hudson picked up his companion’s revolver to examine it. It went off immediately, sending a bullet through his left knee. Blood came streaming, more blood than he had ever seen.
The young man, afraid that Hudson would die without medical care, decided to ride out in search of rescue. He left Hudson a jug of water, locked him in the windowless cabin “to prevent the intrusion of unwelcome prowlers,” and promised to return before nightfall. He didn’t. When darkness came, it was total — Hudson had no candle. Shivering with pain under his blood-soaked poncho, finding that he could “neither doze nor think,” all he could do was listen. And yet he did think, a lovely thought about the importance of hearing to unsighted people and animals dwelling in the dark — one of those sudden flashes of empathy for otherness that our own suffering can spark.
Suddenly he registered a strange sound, as if someone were dragging a rope across the clay floor. He lit one of his few matches and looked around, but saw nothing, and so he passed the “black anxious hours” with his mind’s ear pressed to the world outside the cabin, until he could hear the emissaries of dawn — the scissor-tail tyrant birds twittering in the willow, the red-billed finches singing in the reeds, a song that sounded like crying.
But none was more assuring, more life-affirming than “the dreamy, softly rising and falling, throaty warblings of the white-rumped swallow”:
A loved and beautiful bird is this, that utters his early song circling round and round in the dusky air, when the stars begin to pale; and his song, perhaps, seems sweeter than all others, because it corresponds in time to that rise in the temperature and swifter flow of the blood — the inward resurrection experienced on each morning of our individual life.
As day at last began to break, an enormous venomous snake slithered out from under his poncho — it had slept beside him all night.
The young Englishman returned in the morning with an oxcart that took Hudson, over two delirious days along a hot dusty road, to the headquarters of the South American Missionary Society. There he remained bedridden for months, his dreams crushed, his expedition foreclosed before it had begun. With no birds to observe, Hudson began examining the very instrument of observation.
A generation before Virginia Woolf wrote so movingly about illness as a portal to self-understanding, Hudson found in his incapacitation, in the devastation of his plans, what we always find when we are forced to halt our ordinary methods of avoiding ourselves — an unbidden opening into the nature of the mind, into that glowing space between the mechanics of cognition and the mystery of consciousness, articulated in the language of his heart: birds.
He writes:
Lying helpless on my back through the long sultry mid-summer days, with the white-washed walls of my room for landscape and horizon, and a score or two of buzzing house-flies, perpetually engaged in their intricate airy dance, for only company, I was forced to think on a great variety of subjects, and to occupy my mind with other problems than that of migration. These other problems, too, were in many ways like the flies that shared my apartment, and yet always remained strangers to me, as I to them, since between their minds and mine a great gulf was fixed. Small unpainful riddles of the earth; flitting, sylph-like things, that began life as abstractions, and developed, like imago from maggot, into entities: I always flitted among them, as they performed their mazy dance, whirling in circles, falling and rising, poised motionless, then suddenly cannoning against me for an instant, mocking my power to grasp them, and darting off again at a tangent. Baffled I would drop out of the game, like a tired fly that goes back to his perch, but like the resting, restive fly I would soon turn towards them again; perhaps to see them all wheeling in a closer order, describing new fantastic figures, with swifter motions, their forms turned to thin black lines, crossing and recrossing in every direction, as if they had all combined to write a series of strange characters in the air, all forming a strange sentence — the secret of secrets! Happily for the progress of knowledge only a very few of these fascinating elusive insects of the brain can appear before us at the same time: as a rule we fix our attention on a single individual, like a falcon amid a flight of pigeons or a countless army of small field finches; of a dragon-fly in the thick of a cloud of mosquitoes, or infinitesimal sand-flies. Hawk and dragon-fly would starve if they tried to capture, or even regarded, more than one at a time.
Hudson sometimes hobbled out of his room with a stick to talk to people, but although he listened earnestly “to the story of their small un-avian affairs,” he had never found it easy to connect with humans:
I could always quit them without regret to lie on the green sward, to gaze up into the trees or the blue sky, and speculate on all imaginable things.
With the distance of a lifetime, he would look back on the experience as a microcosm of life itself, in which it never the execution of our plans but their interruption, those rude demolitions of the maquette we mistake for reality, that leaves us most profoundly transformed, deepened, magnified:
Our waking life is sometimes like a dream, which proceeds logically enough until the stimulus of some new sensation, from without or within, throws it into temporary confusion, or suspends its action; after which it goes on again, but with fresh characters, passions, and motives, and a changed argument.
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