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| By Helen Macdonald |
I’ve always hated staying still. I was the child who fidgeted, the student who couldn’t concentrate, who would find any excuse to leave her desk and wander the streets, not to go shopping, or to meet friends, but simply to keep moving as a way to escape anxiety. It’s a tactic that has worked for me for many years, but now, like millions of others, I have to remain within the walls of my home. This confinement is a challenge for me, one so absurdly unimportant in the face of the current crisis that I’m uncomfortable even speaking of it. But it’s a difficulty all the same.
Recently I fired up a very old computer, a heavy, slow beast that still has within it all the research files I was working on nearly two decades ago. I was searching for a series of photographs I took in an Oxford library. Here they are. The patterns on the underside of soaring buzzard wings drawn in pencil upon a flattened cigarette pack. Photographs, letters. A hand-drawn map of Oflag VIIB, the prisoner-of-war camp in Eichstätt, Bavaria, where the German Army held Allied officers from 1940 to 1945, and pages and pages of notebooks written by prisoners who spent their days in this camp, and others, recording the lives of birds that nested there.
In Britain, comparisons to the Second World War have become a refrain of the Covid-19 crisis. Myriad political commentators have praised that era’s heroism, the ability of the British people to cope with discomfort and hardship. They use the war to encourage us to approach the pandemic with poise and equanimity. Such exhortations traduce the terrible realities of that war, and tend to flatten the worst aspects of this crisis too, and this is why I’m hesitant to draw any parallels between the lives of young men confined in a prison camp and the minor inconveniences of lockdown. But something about the present circumstances made me remember those men and want to revisit the notes they took.
They wrote about arriving in the camp and deciding it was paradise for a bird-watcher. Of how they watched for hours at a time, alone or in shifts — teams of men whose attention was fixed on the goldfinches that nested within the wire fences, on redstarts and wrynecks or warblers or crows — taking exactingly detailed notes of what those birds were doing every second of their witnessed lives. One watcher, Peter Conder, who later became the director of Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, eventually escaped captivity carrying his precious notes in a rucksack fashioned from an old shirt. These men told themselves that their notes would be of scientific importance once the war was over, but I don’t think that’s why they made their rigorous observations. I think doing so brought them comfort; the birds they watched were free and knew nothing of war, and they were the same kinds they knew from home. But mostly watching the birds was a way of mobilizing attention, to turn it into a means of imaginative escape, a way to counter their own sense of captivity, of powerlessness, futility and despair.
Over the last weeks, I’ve often seen it suggested in the press and social media that spending time in the natural world can bring comfort and consolation during the pandemic. It’s a notion rich with privilege, for Covid-19 is disproportionately affecting communities with little financial capital living in urban environments, for whom access to acres of forests or fields is difficult or impossible. But as these notebooks show, there are small, local methods of regarding the natural world that are available to anyone and can lessen the psychological burden of adversity.
During lockdown I have been spending a considerable amount of time watching the common birds that visit my small backyard. There are pigeons, starlings, blackbirds collecting beakfuls of dried grass to line their nests, sparrows taking dust baths in a patch of bare and sunlit earth. Watching animals from your home — and they can be anything from sparrows to spiders on windowsills — can give solace through the shift in perspective that the writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch called ‘‘unselfing.’’ In her book ‘‘The Sovereignty of Good,’’ she gave the example of how, when feeling anxious and resentful and caught up in your own concerns, you might look out of the window and see a hovering kestrel; stare at it — and then the world becomes all kestrel, just for a while. Your brooding self disappears, and when you return to yourself, your mental suffering has been lessened.
Most of us expect our lives to have familiar trajectories and spend our days secure in our assumptions about how things will go and what will happen next. Covid-19 has many terrible effects, but one that is particularly quiet and strange is how it has unmoored us from that familiar expectation. Everything is on hold. The future is indeterminate. We do not know what will happen next. We cannot. The sparrows that hop on the bricks of my backyard wall have daily routines I am coming to know, and witnessing them is calming to watch when I have few of my own. As I look out of my window in lockdown, my attention is fixed on these birds, rather than trees or distant rooftops, because I am desperate for novelty, to watch things that alter; for in seeing change, I can parse time.
While the prison-camp ornithologists took their notes, their lives were being controlled by camp administrators and guards, their futures dictated by the frighteningly unknowable progression of the war. They were crammed into close quarters, fed noisome rations, trapped in a situation in which they had no control over what would happen to them. But they could observe. ‘‘I used to watch this pair of goldfinches for 10 hours a day,’’ Peter Conder wrote, ‘‘and sometimes up to 13 hours, with only a minute or two for breaks.’’ The simple act of watching the birds could lessen the grip of dismal circumstances upon these men. But by making their careful notes, they did something more: grant themselves a new sense of control. Like his fellow bird-minded internees, Conder wrote down everything the birds did, every visit they made to the nest, every song, every flight to and from nearby trees, every hop and scratch and turn. These men were writing trajectories, borrowed from the lives of birds, that made the passing of time meaningful. Trajectories that ran backward rather than forward, but were reassuringly solid and sustained all the same.
The word ‘‘observation’’ comes from the Latin observatio, and its etymological history spans acts of both observation and observance. As I read these prison-camp notebooks, I began to see that what these men did was a form of devotion. They were using the small lives of birds as things they could orient themselves against. Their patient observations remind me of how monks in medieval monasteries ordered their days to fill them with meaning. How they made careful notes of the weather, of the changing pattern of the stars, and how they timed their prayers according to the precise positions of celestial objects. I never thought that I could be content to stay still, but I remember those monks, look at the notes taken by the men watching small birds behind the wire, and think, too, of Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s book ‘‘The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating,’’ the story of how, confined to bed for many months by a debilitating mitochondrial disease, she made careful observations of a tiny snail that had been brought in from outside in a pot of violets, transforming what she saw into a rich meditation on snails and time and habitation and purpose at a time when all other life was out of reach. What she came to understand during that time is something I have been late in learning. We don’t need to strike out into the wild to feel close to the natural world and receive benison from it. From one place, we can witness the sweep and dip of the universe about us. The stars over the monastery gables, the birds on the wire, the street pigeons that visit the patch of grass behind my house before flying off elsewhere. We can become deeply connected to the world through paying the most careful and fearless attention to what we can see, from wherever it is we must be.
Illustration by Brian Rea.
Helen Macdonald is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of the best-selling memoir “H Is for Hawk.” She last wrote for the magazine about Brexit and the ancient British ritual of swan upping.
Helen Macdonald is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of the best-selling memoir “H Is for Hawk.” She last wrote for the magazine about Brexit and the ancient British ritual of swan upping.
