Vesper Flights

"The first one I wanted to talk about is Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald, who is British. She’s a naturalist and a scientist and observer and has written several books that she has narrated as audiobooks: she reads her own. Vesper Flights is a collection of more than 30 essays and there’s something really compelling about her narration of these stories. Some of them are very personal. Some of them are just wonderful observations about nature, natural things, and particularly birds—she’s also the author of H is for Hawk . “We want to make sure that each book is a brilliant listening experience. That’s what it’s about” They’re short listening. I would say that probably each one of the stories is less than an hour, which makes for an interesting type of audiobook. I found them very contemplative. They were an escape, in the sense that they take you away. They make you think about something that is not in this world or at least not in your own world around you right this minute. That’s one of the things that I loved about them. She does. She has a style that’s a little bit conversational, in a way, but she’s also quite precise about her observations. So, as a naturalist, she tells you about what she sees in the natural world, whether it’s about birds’ nests or a garden or something else. She’s precise, but she has a very engaging way of telling you about it, as if she were sitting with you saying, ‘I saw the most amazing thing! This is what I observed and this is what it made me think of.’ She takes you with her."

"Yes, and it shows very clearly that Helen Macdonald is not a one-book writer. This is a coruscating collection. She does a lot of things. She bemoans the fascist weaponising of English tradition. She speculates on our need to see in bird murmurations shapes that are familiar to us. She fears that modern children are going to learn to regard the constant disappearance of species as the ordinary way of the world. She talks about the hides the bird watchers use—suggesting that far from connecting us with the natural world, they divide us from it and encourage us to see animals and plants as spectacles. And lots more. It’s a wonderful potpourri. But, as she describes it, the message of this book is that our love of the natural world should not be self-love. We, too, easily see other lives, whether they are human or non-human lives, as mirrors of our own, and that sort of narcissism enrages the elemental gods. So this book is a counter to the others, really. The others have emphasised connectivity. They’ve said that the boundaries between us and the natural world are porous, if not completely non-existent. But Macdonald says, ‘Okay, yes, there’s a connection. But don’t forget that a badger is importantly different from you. You might adore badgers, but don’t go using them as vehicles of self-adoration.’ Yes. She is, in many ways, a very philosophical writer. Sometimes an infuriating writer. But she’s always immensely good company. Although she’s tremendously learned, she is also a great lover of the natural world. She says in this book that all her work is about finding ways to recognise and to love the difference between things. I know what she means, and it’s arrogant to think that I might know better than she does what her work’s about. But I’d have thought it rather better to say that her concern is with the moral and aesthetic difficulty of responding to a world which contains something wonderful like the soaring swift, and something horrible, like a paediatric oncology ward. It’s theodicy. It’s about the problem of whether it’s moral to be able to enjoy a walk in the woods. For Macdonald what makes the natural world so fascinating is its inaccessibility—rather than (as for me), the tantalising possibility of intimate relationship which rests on the physicists’ assertion of oneness. I tend to side with Kripal, and conclude that in exploring ourselves we necessarily explore badgers, stars, and the spin of electrons, and by exploring badgers, stars, or the spin of electrons, we necessarily discover something about ourselves. Part of our best books of 2020 series."