Status Updates From Vesper Flights

“…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.”

“Even so, when we feed animals, we want it to be on our terms, not theirs. We expect them to respect their place in an unspoken social order.”

“Are we now becoming inured to a new narrative of nature, in which ecosystem-level change in accelerated timescales is part of the background of everyday life?”

“We cannot help measuring the capacities of animals against our own.”

“‘Birdwatcher’ is old British intelligence slang for a spy,…”

“We need our books, our craft projects, our dogs and knitting, our movies, gardens and gigs. It’s who we are. We’re held together by our lives, our interests, and all our chosen comforts. But we can’t have only those things, because then we can’t work out where we should be headed.”

“All of us have to live our lives most of the time inside the protective structures that we have built; none of us can bear too much reality.“

“These ascents are called vespers flights, or vesper flights, after the Latin vesper for evening. Vespers are evening devotional prayers, the last and most solemn of the day, and I have always thought ‘vesper flights’ the most beautiful phrase, and ever-falling blue.”

“Sleeping was like losing time, somehow like not being alive, and drifting into it at night there sometimes came a panic that I might not find my way back from wherever I had gone.”

Aha, the title chapter!

“Fate comes up out of nowhere in the headlights glowing like a goddamned unicorn, and whatever meaning drivers choose to take from the collision falls upon them as inescapably as any medieval allegory.”

“It had weaponised history and tradition.”