Status Updates From Voli vespertini e altri sag...

“ fungi, force us to consider the limits of our understanding: not everything fits easily into our systems of classification. The world might be, it turns out, too complicated for us to know.”

“And perhaps my wonky neurology was reading too much from this experience, but sometimes, I went on to think, when you berate yourself, it might be the case that you do so needlessly. Sometimes it is not you. Sometimes the world is to blame.”

“We do not want to imagine what it would be like to have our familiar places reduced to ruins.”

“Something tugs at my heart. I’ll never see any of these birds again. If I weren’t this high, and the birds weren’t briefly illuminated by this column of light cast by a building thrown up through the Depression years to celebrate earthly power and capital confidence, I’d never have seen them at all.”

“That messy stretches of species-rich vegetation, with all their attendant invertebrate life are better, just better, than eerie, impoverished silence of modern planting schemes and fields. I wonder how we might learn to align our aesthetic and moral landscapes to fit that intuition. I wonder. I think of the meadow.”

“We so often think of the past is something like a nature, reserve: a discrete, bounded place we can visit in our imaginations to make us feel better. I wonder how we could learn to recognise that the past is always working on us and through us, and that diversity in all its forms, human and natural, is strength.“

“When habitats are destroyed, what is lost are exquisite ecological complexities and all the lives that make them what they are.”

“When you are small, the things you see around you promise you they’ll continue as they are forever, and you measure life in days and weeks, not years.”

“The process of identifying animals in this way had a fascinating history, for field guides have closely tracked changes in the ways we interact with nature.”

“And then, after a few moments, I tell him that I like his sea lions very much.
He frowns as if he’s assuming upon himself the responsibility of my being one of the elect.
‘Lots of people think they are…’ he pauses contemptuously, ‘seals.’
‘But of course the are sea lions!’ I say.”

“And being considered by a mind that is not human forces you to reconsider the limits of your own.”

“When we meet animals for the first time, we expect them to conform to the stories we’ve heard about them. But there is always a gap. The boar was still a surprise. Animals are.”