Simply knowing that fragment of history and knowing that domesticated turkey chicks freeze when a hawk-like shape flies overhead makes them more complicated creatures in my mind than farmyard poultry or oven-ready carcasses. For the more time spent researching, watching and interacting with animals, the more the stories they’re made of change, turning into richer stories with the power to alter not only what you think of the animal, but who you are. It has broadened my notion of home to think of what that concept might mean to a nurse shark or a migratory barn swallow; altered my notion of family after I learned of the breeding systems of acorn woodpeckers, where several males and females together raise a nest of young. It’s not that creatures work as models for human lives – no one I know thinks that humans should spawn like wave-borne fish or subsist entirely on flies – but the more I’ve learned about animals the more I’ve come to think there might not be only one right way to express care, to feel allegiance, a love for place, a way of moving through the world.
Trying to imagine what life is like for an animal is doomed to failure. You cannot know what it is like to be a bat by screwing your eyes tight, imagining membranous wings, finding your way through darkness by talking to it in tones that reply to you with the shape of the world. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel explained, the only way to know what it is like to be a bat is to be a bat. But the imagining? The attempt? That is a good and important thing. It forces you to think about what you don’t know about the creature: what it eats, where it lives, how it communicates with others. The effort generates questions that are really about how different the world might be for a bat, not just how being a bat is different. For what an animal needs or values in a place is not always what we need, value or even notice. Muntjac deer have eaten the undergrowth where nightingales once nested in the forests near my home, and now those birds have gone. What to my human eye is a place of natural beauty is, for a nightingale, something like a desert. Perhaps this is why I am impatient with the argument that we should value natural places for their therapeutic benefits. It’s true that time walking in a forest can be beneficial to our mental health. But valuing a forest for that purpose traduces what forests are: they are not there for us alone.
For some weeks I’ve been worried about the health of family and friends. Today I’ve stared at a computer screen for hours. My eyes hurt. My heart, too. Feeling the need for air, I sit on my back doorstep and see a rook, a sociable species of European crow, flying low towards my house through greying evening air. Straight away I use the trick I learned as a child, and all my difficult emotions lessen as I imagine how the press of cooling air might feel against its wings. But my deepest relief doesn’t come from imagining I can feel what the rook feels, know what the rook knows – instead, it’s slow delight in knowing I cannot. These days I take emotional solace from knowing that animals are not like me, that their lives are not about us at all. The house it’s flying over has meaning for both of us. To me it is home; to the rook? A waypoint on a journey, a collection of tiles and slopes, useful as a perch, or a thing to drop walnuts on in autumn to make them shatter and let it winkle out the flesh inside.
But there is something else. As it passes overhead, the rook tilts its head to regard me briefly before flying on. And with that glance I feel a prickling in my skin that runs down my spine, my sense of place shifts, and the world is enlarged. The rook and I have shared no purpose. We noticed each other, is all. When I looked at the rook and the rook looked at me, I became a feature of its world as much as it became a feature of mine. Our separate lives coincided, and all my self-absorbed anxiety vanished in that one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere else sent a glance across the divide and stitched me back into a world where both of us have equal billing.
Acknowledgements
Vast thanks to my agent Bill Clegg, for his astonishing critical acumen, warmth, support, inspiration and wisdom. From our very first meeting I felt I’d known him for ever. I’m so happy to have found a home with the Clegg Agency. Thank you to all the staff there, who have been, and are, marvellous: Marion Duvert, David Kambhu and Simon Toop deserve particular gratitude, not least for putting up with my appallingly slow email replies.
Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape is not only a legend in publishing but among the finest people the world has ever made, and I am honoured to count him not only as my editor but as a friend. Thank you, Dan, for everything. Huge thanks also to Bea Hemming, Rachel Cugnoni, Aidan O’Neill, Alison Tulett, Sarah-Jane Forder, Suzanne Dean, Chris Wormell, and all the other people who have worked to make this book a real live thing. It is a delight and an honour to work with you all.
Elisabeth Schmitz at Grove Atlantic is a marvel in so many ways it would take an encomium the size of a book to enumerate them all. I am so thrilled to work with her, and owe her so very much. Undying and very special thanks to you, Elisabeth. And enormous thanks also to all those I’ve been lucky enough to work with at Grove: Morgan Entrekin, of course; Deb Seager, John Mark Boling, Judy Hottenson, and so many more. Your offices in New York always feel like home.
To the booksellers, festival and event organisers and volunteers, and the readers, interlocutors and audiences I have met with over the last few years, thank you all. The conversations I have had with you over this time have enriched my life and thought beyond all measure. Special thanks to the refugee who met and spoke to me as part of Refugee Tales, an outreach project of the charity Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, and the volunteer who accompanied him to our meeting. Neither can be named here, but I hope that the words that came from that meeting communicate the injustice of the hardships that the structures and strictures of the world visit upon those who do not deserve anything other than happiness.
Some of these pieces were written for friends, for the joy of exploring a subject, for piecing together a story or investigating something that troubled or fascinated me. Many began life as assignments for the New York Times Magazine, where I have had the joy of working with the truly brilliant editor Sasha Weiss. She has taught me so much about forging and fashioning pieces like these. I will never stop being grateful to her and her colleagues. Thank you, Sasha! Many of the other essays included here began life as meditations on seasonality for the New Statesman: thank you, Tom Gatti, for commissioning them and for putting up with my habitual last-minutery with such patience and good humour. Others were written for inclusion in anthologies (thank you, Tim Dee, Andy Holden, Anna Pincus and David Herd), for the online magazine Aeon (thank you, Marina Benjamin), or, in the case of ‘Murmuration’, to accompany the work of the wonderful artist Sarah Wood.
Deep love and thanks to my family: Barbara, Mo, James, Cheryl, Aimee, Beatrice, Alexandrina and Arthur, and my much-missed dad Alisdair – wherever he is, he’s probably still cross about my telling him how to push goats. Deep love and thanks also to my BFF Christina McLeish, who has a brain the size of Jupiter and a heart of about the same size, and more than any other person has helped shape and test my thoughts about things. She is the only person who has ever video-called me to show me a bright green newly emerged cicada wandering around her open palm. That is how excellent she is.
This book was born of the inspiration, friendship, assistance and support of many, many people. My thanks to Thomas Adès, Christine Anders, Sin Blaché, Nathan Budd, Nathalie Cabrol, Casey Cep, Jason Chapman, Garry and Jon Chapman, Marcus Coates, Alan Cumming, Sam Davis, Bill Diamond, Sarah Dollard, Ewan Dryburgh, Abigail Elek Schor, Amanda and Stuart Fall, Andrew Farnsworth, Melissa Febos, Tony Fitzpatrick, Marina Frasca-Spada, Stephen Grosz, Meg and Larry Kasdan, Nick Jardine, Olivia Laing, Michael Langley, Hermione Lister-Kaye, Sir John Lister-Kaye, Toby Mayhew, Andrew Metcalf, Paraic O’Donnell, Fil OK, Stacey Reedman, Eamonn Ryan, Jan Schafer, Grant Shaffer, Kathryn Schulz, Pablo Sobron, Isabella Streffen, Cristian Tambley, Béla Tokody, Mukund Unavane, Judith Wakelam, Hilary White, Lydia Wilson, Jeanette Winterson, Jessica Woollard. I am a lamentably disorganised person and very likely to have omi
tted some people from this list by accident. It’s likely that I will, over the next few months, be waking in the small hours in a total panic as I remember them, one by one. My apologies to them in advance.
And while he cannot read, and is likely to shred this page into fragments should he get his beak to it in the future, I want to thank my parrot Birdoole for his feathery companionship and his ability to make long hours of writing less lonely. I love him very much, even when he sits on my keyboard and bites my fingers as I’m working to urgent deadlines.
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