January 2025
I picked up this book, probably about a year ago, at the recommendation of Dan Russell. Right now, I am about a quarter of the way through it, and it is a wonderful compilation of essays. She is a superb writer, and particularly her descriptions and imagery of the natural world is remarkable.
I like her aim as well:
What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. — Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights. p. ix
Favorites
- 2. Nothing Like a Pig.
- 9. Ants
- 10. Symptomatic
- 12. Winter Woods
1. Nests
This essay describes nests. She begins with her feelings about nests develop when she was a child, and encountered them in her yard. She then goes into the present, and reflects more on this than their meanings.
*2. Nothing like a Pig
This essay describes an encounter with a boar. She reflects both on the boar, and more in general on animals in particular, and how the conception of an animal differs from the reality of the animal
Then it happens: a short, collapsing moment as sixty or seventy yards away something walks fast between the trees, and then the boar. The boar. The boar.
– Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald, p 11.
A great bit of writing. The “short, collapsing moment.” The uncertainty about distance — :sixty or seventy yards” — and what she is seeing — “something.” The revelation: “and then the boar.” And the repetition: “The boar. The boar.”
3. Inspector Calls
A very nice short piece about an encounter with autistic boy, who is visiting her flat with his parents. In particular he connects with her bird and the bird with him.
4. Field Guides
“Field guides made possible the joy of encountering a thing I already knew but had never seen.”
5. Terkels Park
An essay on the place where she grew up. A bit nostalgic, but it was unusual, and had interesting reflections, so I found it worth reading. Some very nice writing:
I could lie awake in the small hours and hear a single motorbike speeding west or east: a long, yawning burr that dopplered into memory and replayed itself in dreams.
— ibid. p 12
My eyes catch on the place where the zoetrope flicker of pines behind the fence gives way to a patch of sky with the black peak of a redwood tree against it and the cradled mathematical branches of a monkey puzzle, and my head blooms with an apprehension of lost space,
— Ibid. p 13
6. High-Rise
About watching migrating birds at night from the top of the Empire State Building. An interesting discussion of how birds migrate — the height and speeds at which they fly, and the way they navigate — and the problems that the lights and tall buildings of the city give them.
7. The Human Flock
“Overhead a long wavering chevron of beating wings is inked across the darkening sky.“
Recounting the observation of large flocks of migrating cranes, and continuing to a discussion of the dynamics of swarms and murmurations. “Turns can propagate through a cloud of birds at speeds approaching 90 miles an hour…” This segues into a concluding comment on refugees, and a plea to regard them as individuals rather than masses.
8. The Student’s Tale
An account of meeting a student who is a refugee and spending time in camps…
A great opening sentence:
There’s a window and the rattle of a taxi and grapes on the table, black ones, sweet ones, and the taxi is also black and there’s a woman inside it, a charity worker who befriended you when you were in detention, and she’s leaning to pay the driver and through the dust and bloom of the glass I see you standing on the pavement next to the open taxi door and your back is turned towards me so all I can see are your shoulders hunched in a blue denim jacket.
— The Student’s Tale, Vesper Flight, Kate Macdonald, p. 53
I think this is a marvelous stream-of-consciousness sentence, with the writers attention shifting from taxi to grapes to taxi to the woman and then to the student whose shoulders are hunched. The second person is also very effective.
*9. Ants
About the mating flights of ants, and the birds that prey upon them. Also reflects on the power of scientific understanding to enhance the beauty of things, rather than detract: “…it’s things I’ve learned from scientific books and papers that are making what I’m watching almost unbearably moving.”
A red kite joins the flock, drifting and tilting through it on paper-cut wings stamped black against the sky.
[…]
The hitching curves of the gulls in a vault of sky crossed with thousands of different flightiness, warm airspace tense with predatory intent and the tiny hopes of each rising ant.
— Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 63
*10. Symptomatic
Discusses her experiences with migraines. The writing is beautiful and ranges from describing the onset and symptoms of her migraine, to the way in which she has come to live with them. Ends with a partial analogy to earth undergoing climate change…
I was busily signing books when a spray of sparks, an array of livid and prickling phosphenes like shorting fairy lights, spread downwards from the upper right-hand corner of my vision until I could barely see through them.
—Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 66
11. Sex, Death, Mushrooms
On mushroom hunting: “It is raining hard, and the forest air is sweet and winey with decay.“
The air is damp and dark in here. Taut lines of spider silk are slung between their flaking trunks; I can feel them snapping across my chest. Fat garden spiders drop from my coat on to the thick carpet of pine needles below.
—Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 80
* 12. Winter Woods
Beginning with her custom of walking in the woods every New Year’s day, she reflects on the things that are distinctive about forests in winter. From the revelation of the landscape, to the bark textures and angled branches of leafless trees, to the sometimes transitory life that becomes evident. Winter woods, she suggests, are full of potential:
So often we think of mindfulness, of existing purely in the present moment, as a spiritual goal. But winter woods teach me something else: the importance of thinking about history. They are able to show you the last five hours, the last five days, the last five centuries, all at once. They’re wood and soil and rotting leaves, the crystal fur of hoarfrost and the melting of overnight snow, but they are also places of different interpolated timeframes. In them, potentiality crackles in the winter air.
—ibid., p. 85
Eclipse
On viewing a solar eclipse. The phenomenology of the event, but also the deep, irrational, fundamental, emotional impact. The essay is reminiscent of Joan Didion’s essay, and in particular the way in which the fading daylight alters the colors in ways that cast the landscape in an alien light. It ends, beautifully, with a description of the light returning, and the emotions that brings.
In Her Orbit
A description of a trip with an astrobiologist to study extremophiles at very high altitudes in the Andes. Some beautiful descriptions of desolate and unworldly environments.
Hares
A description of the phenomenon of boxing hares, their place in English thought and mythology, and their decline due to environmental change.
Lost, But Catching Up
A very short essay description her intersection with a hound that was trying to catch up to the pack during a fox hunt.
Swan Upping Nestboxes
About the English tradition of “Swan Upping,” and her experience observing the activity; all interladen with reflections on the role of tradition and its uneasy releationship to Brexit, which had recently occurred.
Deer in the Headlights
The Falcon and the Tower
Vesper Flights
In Spight of Prisons
Sun Birds and Cashmere Spheres
The Observatory
Wicken
Storm
Murmurations
A Cuckoo in the House
The Arrow-Stork
Ashes
A Handful of Corn
Berries
Cherry Stones
Birds, Tabled
Hiding
Eulogy
Rescue
Goats
Dispatches from the Valleys
The Numinous Ordinary
What Animals Taught Me
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