Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald

Vesper Flights - Helen  MacDonald


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       H Is for Hawk

       Falcon

       Shaler’s Fish

      Copyright © 2020 by Helen Macdonald

      Jacket design by Suzanne Dean

      Jacket photograph © Chris Wormell

      Some of these pieces have appeared in different form in the New York Times Magazine, New Statesman and elsewhere.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

      First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Jonathan Cape

      First Grove Atlantic eBook edition: August 2020

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

      eISBN 978-0-8021-4669-4

      Grove Press

      an imprint of Grove Atlantic

      154 West 14th Street

      New York, NY 10011

      Distributed by Publishers Group West

      groveatlantic.com

       Contents

       Sex, Death, Mushrooms

       Winter Woods

       Eclipse

       In Her Orbit

       Hares

       Lost, But Catching Up

       Swan Upping

       Nestboxes

       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

       Acknowledgements

      Back in the sixteenth century, a curious craze began to spread through the halls, palaces and houses of Europe. It was a type of collection kept often in ornate wooden cases, and it was known as a Wunderkammer, a Cabinet of Curiosities, although the direct translation from the German captures better its purpose: cabinet of wonders. It was expected that people should pick up and handle the objects in these cases; feel their textures, their weights, their particular strangenesses. Nothing was kept behind glass, as in a modern museum or gallery. More importantly, perhaps, neither were these collections organised according to the museological classifications of today. Wunderkammern held natural and artificial things together on shelves in close conjunction: pieces of coral; fossils; ethnographic artefacts; cloaks; miniature paintings; musical instruments; mirrors; preserved specimens of birds and fish; insects; rocks; feathers. The wonder these collections kindled came in part from the ways in which their disparate contents spoke to one another of their similarities and differences in form, their beauties and manifest obscurities. I hope that this book works a little like a Wunderkammer. It is full of strange things and it is concerned with the quality of wonder.

      Someone once told me that every writer has a subject that underlies everything they write. It can be love or death, betrayal or belonging, home or hope or exile. I choose


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