Status Updates From Vesper Flights

Wonderful essays that each convey more information and heart in a few pages (they are brief) than some books manage in hundreds of pages.

“…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.”

“We use animals as ideas to amplify and enlarge aspects of ourselves, turning them into simple, safe harbours for things we feel and often cannot express.”

“The goat gets up, stares at him and run away. And the press pack never let him forget the time he pushed a goat over in front of all of them, and it was all my fault.”

“For years, on and off, I have woken in the dark, shouting out loud, stricken with horror at the impossible fact of death. It has been my most abiding and paralyzing terror…”

“There are acceptable animals and unacceptable animals, as there have been deserving and undeserving, poor, and the lines of respectability are drawn in familiar ways, through appealing to fears and threats of invasion, foreignness, violence and disease. As usual, animals reflect back at us our own assumptions about the natural structure of the world.”

“When a wary squirrel or bird trust you sufficiently to take food from your hand, it’s gratifying and special, reaching across the border between us and them, wild and tame. But if a squirrel runs unbidden up your arm demanding food or a seagull snatches a sandwich from your hands, it often generates an emotion close to outrage.”