Via Positiva
Chapter Three: Winter
This chapter is a bit of a travel log. She speaks of Starlings and spiders and coots and the weather. Everywhere she is respecting both life and death. She is in awe of the work that life does. Have you ever hesitated to disturb a spider web, knowing that the spider has worked so diligently? Have you ever looked at your old insect collection and thought that maybe is was a cruel exercise in presumed sovereignty?
Desiderata:
- Starlings: “According to Edwin Way Teale, ‘Their coming was the result of one man’s fancy. That man was Eugene Shieffelin, a wealthy New York drug manufacturer. His curious hobby was the introduction to America of all the birds mentioned in William Shakespeare.’” (37) (He released 100 in Central Park in NYC. Now Starlings are ubiquitous and stubbornly entrenched.)
- “Winter clear-cuts and reseeds the easy way. Everywhere paths unclog.” (40)
- “All that summer conceals, winter reveals” (40) (In winter, when the leaves are dropped, there is something different to see.)
- “I’m getting used to this planet and to this curious human culture which is cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully cruel.” (43)
- “When his father was young, he used to walk out on Great South Bay, which has frozen over, and frozen the gulls to it. Some of the gulls were already dead. He would take a hunk of driftwood and brain the living gulls; then with a steel knife he hacked them free below the body and rammed them into a burlap sack. The family ate herring gull all winter, close around a lighted table in a steamy room. And out on the Bay, the ice was studded with paired, red stumps” (43) (Something in this made me laugh, is that the cheerfully cruel in me?)
- “Things out of place are ill.” (53) (She says this when she has a cocoon of spiders in her pocket! Out of place and ill.)
