H is for Hawk

by Helen Macdonald

It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone.

Vast flocks of fieldfares netted the sky, turning it to something strangely like a sixteenth-century sleeve sewn with pearls.

It’s a habit you can fall into, willing yourself into invisibility. And it doesn’t serve you well in life.

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.

Underlying the whole long affair was a deep repetition compulsion, the term Freud used to describe the need to re-enact painful experiences in order to master them.

‘He has been frightened into insanity, being, like all predatory people, by nature terrified at heart,’ he wrote of Gos.

We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine.