Solitary Sandpiper
Upstate South Carolina
"We need another and wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."
Henry Beston
The Outermost House:
A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod
That quote puts me in mind of an exchange I overheard in a bird hide on the Norfolk coast many years ago. A young man entered the hide and enquired "Anything remarkable about?". An older birdwatcher, an Irishman with a strong accent, replied "Sure enough, they're all remarkable, for they can fly and we can not!"
ReplyDeleteWell said, John. Thanks for that story.
DeleteYes. I am often struck by the way birds have a geography of the Earth that is massively different to our own. Most of us most of the time don't notice. If a bird could describe the planet they lived on (OK, it's a human thing to do, not a bird thing but stay with me) to an alien, he she or it could be forgiven for thinking the bird lived on a completely different planet to the human they'd conversed with the day before. Life tends to specialize and the things we think make us superior to the rest of the "animal kingdom" are merely our specializations.
ReplyDeleteWell said, Dominic, and I think your point would apply not only to the animal-human perspectives, but also to the human to human perspectives. Egos, by nature, drive us to develop perspectives that are oriented toward individual survival and prosperity. Overcoming that — or at least keeping it in check — may be the greatest challenge we have.
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