Shannon > Recent Status Updates

Elizabeth was worth thinking about. She was tall, with mouse-coloured hair. Her lips were Louis Philippe, and she was lovely—a natural champion of the divided skirt.

I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it. Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.

To her right is a male martial eagle, an antelope-killing black and white monster with piercing white eyes. It is enormous, bigger than most of the dogs walking past the mesh fence in front of the marquee, and it watches them go by with its black chrysanthemum-petalled crest raised in idle speculation of murder.

After twenty minutes Mabel raises a foot. It looks ridiculous. She is not relaxed enough to fluff out her feathers; she still resembles a wet and particoloured seal. But she makes this small concession to calmness, and she stands there like a man driving with one hand resting on the gearstick.

'To know her was to love her,' [Lewes] wrote in his diary in 1859, recalling their first acquaintance. 'Since then my life has been a new birth. To her I owe all my prosperity & all my happiness. God bless her!' The sense of grateful, joyful indebtedness was mutual. The name under which she became famous was a tribute to him: she was George because he was George.

Flying the hawk free, unencumbered by the creance, nothing stopping her headlong flight out and away but the lines that run between us; palpable lines, not physical ones: lines of habit, of hunger, of partnership, of familiarity....Flying a hawk free is always scary. It is where you test those lines. And it's not a thing that's easy to do when you've lost trust in the world, and your heart is turned to dust.

I looked at Mabel. Her head drooped forward. She looked indescribably mournful in her hood. I stroked her craggy, snake-scale toes. Snake-scale bird toes are always one of the things I miss from home. We tell Pico he has dinosaur feet.

Eliot's dark but quiet rooms were at the rear of the house. "I can see her now, with her hair over her shoulders, the easy chair half sideways to the fire, her feet over the arms, and a proof in her hands," William Hale White, a fellow resident of the establishment, recalled after her death, providing a physical description that seems startlingly modern.

A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book.

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

The portrait of Rochester is drawn in the dark. We feel the influence of fear in it; just as we constantly feel an acidity which is the result of oppression, a buried suffering smouldering beneath her passion, a rancour which contracts those books, splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation, I thought, opening the door.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown....Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.

Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment.

On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders.

'Need to excel in order to be loved,' White had written in his dream diary. But there is an unspoken coda to that sentence. What happens if you excel at something and discover you are still unloved?...Success is a pressure. He cannot quite bear it. It boils and bubbles. And without knowing it, quietly and cruelly, he begins to sabotage his success, because success cannot be borne. It is so very easily done.

In 1869, the year she started writing the story that would end up being Book Two of Middlemarch, Eliot described her conflict with her father to Emily Davies, the founder of Girton College, the first women's college at Cambridge. Yay Girton!

Coventry was chosen over the countryside because if a husband was to be found for Mary Ann that was where he might most likely be encountered. She hated being nudged out of her home, not least because of the crude dynamics of the matrimonial marketplace upon which she, a complicated commodity, was being floated. "It is like dying to one stage of existence," she wrote to a friend.

Intellectual passion—a love for that "which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires"—is rarely accorded the attention that romantic love commands, as Eliot points out; but the reader whom Eliot addresses will likely recognize this other, overlooked passion, because the chances are that he or she has felt it, too.

Eliot's delineation of the growing attachment between Lydgate and Rosamond is delicious if more than slightly horrifying to read....Watching them make their way towards marriage—she concertedly, he obliviously—has an appalling satisfaction for connoisseurs of romantic plots.

In The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot presents a natural history of yearning.

Books gave us a way to shape ourselves—to form our thoughts and to signal to each other who we were and who we wanted to be. They were part of our self-fashioning, no less than our clothing.

I look at Mabel. She looks at me. So much of what she means is made of people. For thousands of years hawks like her have been caught and trapped and brought into people's houses. But unlike other animals that have lived in such close proximity to man, they have never been domesticated. It's made them a powerful symbol of wildness...and a symbol, too, of things that need to be mastered and tamed.

Oh god, of course all that talk about the moodiness and insanity of goshawks is rooted in sexist narratives about the need to tame and control women. It makes so much sense.

If I shut my eyes I saw White lifting Gos on his fist and shutting his own eyes very tight, as if it were possible for the whole mess of the twentieth century to slip aside, and the world of centuries before be resurrected, a lost community with him at its heart. He would have been loved. He would have been understood.

Looking back, and all for love.

In those long hours of psychoanalysis ...White had learned that going back in time was a way of fixing things; uncovering past traumas, revisiting them and defusing their power....Now he was unconsciously re-enacting his childhood – with the hawk standing in for him as a boy, and the grown-up White playing the role of an enlightened teacher who could not, would not, must not beat or hurt the child in his care.

In the second photograph the boy [T. H. White as a toddler] runs towards the camera over parched earth. He is running as fast as he can...and the expression on his face, half-terror, half-delight, is something I've never seen on any other child. It is triumph that he has ridden the donkey, but relief that it is over. It is a face in desperate need of safety, with certain knowledge that there is none.

Feral. He wanted to be free. He wanted to be ferocious. He wanted to be fey, a fairy, ferox. All those elements of himself he'd pushed away, his sexuality, his desire for cruelty, for mastery: all these were suddenly there in the figure of the hawk. White had found himself in the hawk that Blaine had lost. He clutched it tightly. It might hurt him, but he wouldn't let go.

The falcon. There he was, an impossibly beautiful creature the colour of split flint and chalk, wings crossed sharp over his back, his dark, hooded face turned up to the sky. He was watching the Spitfire overhead with professional curiosity.

The hawks came from Sweden, Germany and Finland: most were huge, pale, taiga forest gosses. Some where released on purpose. Some were simply lost....Elusive, spectacular, utterly at home, the fact of these British goshawks makes me happy. Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands. The wild can be human work.