The Seabirds Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers

"Yes. It’s not as great as Sea Room , which took me apart when I first read it. That was when I was up in the Outer Hebrides. In that book he took me back to childhood, to the experience of the ecstatic immediacy of the natural world, which I had lost. But here’s the thing. He took me back there using sophisticated words and ideas. That was tectonic. He convinced me that as an articulate, educated adult, it was still possible to be a child. Sea Room is the most powerful articulation that I know of the Romantic thesis: that in order to know about the world, or to know what is worth knowing about the world, you’ve got to become a child again. I’d assumed that in order to do that it was necessary to abandon my reading. I’d assumed that language was an impenetrable barrier between me and that sort of ecstatic understanding. He convinced me that wasn’t necessarily so: That was a huge relief. It made nature writing – which has to be done in words – possible. But moving to The Seabird’s Cry , the most exciting thing about that book for me is the fact that you have – often in the course of a single sentence, sometimes in the course of a single clause within a sentence ­– both science and real poetic power. Let’s go back to the discussion we were having about the dislocation of the material and the ‘spiritual’ domains. Nicolson, in making the material and the spiritual cohabit and showing that each is more powerful because of that cohabitation, shows that they should never have been dislocated in the first place. And that that dislocation is not only unnecessary, but does a grave disservice to both. He demonstrates that science is sometimes best explicated in terms of ecstasy , and that ecstasy is sometimes best served by the invocation of scientific facts. An example: he summarises a lot of data about where seabirds spend the winter. And this accumulation of data is a really powerful evocation of the mystery of the world. You couldn’t get the same effect even with the weirdest Blakeian poetry. So he does in The Seabird’s Cry what he did in Sea Room : he puts back together the two human modes of understanding reality. The left brain and the right brain, if you want to put it that way. The rational and the intuitive, or the spiritual and the scientific. And the whole is so much greater than the sum of the parts. “If we try to understand the world just by intuiting it, we will just be amorphous. If we try to understand the world just by dissecting it, we will kill it” If we try to understand the world just by intuiting it, we will just be amorphous. If we try to understand the world just by dissecting it, we will kill it. Adam Nicolson’s achievement is to show that these two ways of describing the world to ourselves are complementary rather than antagonistic. There’s a great political lesson here, of course. Political discourse tends to be conducted in the language of numbered reductionist propositions, and for that reason it doesn’t accurately describe the world, and it doesn’t engage people’s passion. The political elite (which has bought into the materialist worldview) tend to dismiss as fanciful less scientific ways of understanding the world. If those ways of understanding the world could be brought together, in the marriage that I think we see in Adam Nicolson’s book, that’s politically potent. He doesn’t spare us the political impact of what he’s saying. Many of these birds are disastrously endangered by our frankly psychopathic policies towards the environment. If we treated humans as we treat the natural world, we’d be locked up, probably forever, in a secure psychiatric ward. Yet we blithely vote for these psychopathic policies. We have blood on our hands. The anger I’ve just expressed runs through this book. It’s implicit in every paragraph. But because he’s such a brilliant writer, it’s not intrusive. He never sermonises – as I’ve just done. The most impressive sermons, of course, are the sermons that don’t sermonise. So: this is a masterly book. It brings together the fractured halves of human understanding, shows us how we can relate more holistically and therefore more satisfactorily to the world, and illustrates the techniques we need to use to persuade."