H is for Hawk (and also Help)

A book to read when you're going through it: H is for Hawk, and other strategies

When a book finds you at the right time, it feels like a lightning strike of luck. Sometimes, reading feels like casting out lines to sea and reeling in whatever comes up. It’s hard to match up interest and temperament, to find a reading experience that matches your mental state. H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald is a beautifully told, easily read memoir about falconry, grief, and the writer T. H. White. I highly recommend it as a reading experience for anyone who is, as they say, going through it, when ‘it’ could be of many different shades.

Here is a quick rundown of why and to whom I recommend it:¹

• Nature writing, even for people who have never felt the call of the wild

• Readers looking for genuine and deeply felt introspection

• Readers looking to process grief or loss of any dimension

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It’s impossible to know what you will do when faced with an unexpected loss. For Helen MacDonald, an academic completing a fellowship at Cambridge, her first refuge when her father unexpectedly passes away is books. “I bought books on grieving, on loss and bereavement… like a good academic, I thought books were for answers.”

The book that unexpectedly provides the most meaning is T. H. White’s 1951 book The Goshawk. White is best known for his Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King, The Sword in the Stone, etc. He is responsible for much of how we imagine Arthur today: his work is the basis of the Disney adaptation, the way we imagine Merlin with his star-patched hat, the Camelot musical that in turn inspired the legacy of JFK. As MacDonald’s book explores, there is more to him than just Arthurian mythmaking. He was a closeted gay man, haunted by a cruel childhood and tortured by desires that the strict definition of ‘the English gentleman’ made seem weak. White’s desire to train a hawk is clearly about the self:

“White made falconry a metaphysical battle… a literary encounter between man and animal that reached back to the Puritan tradition of spiritual conquest: salvation as a stake to be won in a contest against God.”

This moves MacDonald into her next coping mechanism: the decision to train her own notoriously difficult bird of prey. MacDonald is an experienced falconer, the rare person who has turned a childhood passion into a lifelong career. In White, MacDonald finds a foil. H is for Hawk explores how people externalize feelings onto the natural world while internalizing their own pain. The book switches between MacDonald’s work with her goshawk, Mabel, as well as a personal history of White and his attempt to tame a hawk. White brings just a wee bit of baggage into his falconry, and MacDonald has deep compassion for him:

Like White, I wanted to cut loose from the world, and I shared too his desire to escape to the wild, a desire that can rip away all human softness and leave you stranded in a world of savage, courteous despair.

This premise is out of my usual wheelhouse. Mother Nature? I’m aware of her work. I respect birding as a hobby, but I won’t be tricked into meditating. But this book is a perfect example of how highly individual and specific experiences are often the best lens to capture the universal. MacDonald is writing about a niche hobby through her unique circumstances, yet has also written a beautiful book about a huge, unmanageable topic like personal loss. I can’t relate to nearly anything she does in the book, but I can understand how she feels. The book charts her experience trying to escape herself, to find freedom through this wild animal. Goshawks can be trained, but they cannot be domesticated.

This is not a book to get you out of a reading slump: there is no page-turning plot. It’s about the outdoors but it is a deeply interior book, which is what makes it a restorative reading experience. The writing is beautiful and insightful, fluidly moving between MacDonald’s experience, her history of White, and larger reflections on how people imagine and re-imagine nature to fit our own histories. Most falconers are hunters, a fact she struggles with—the literal violence of it, the violence of its history, and the way that history is deployed to invoke ‘Old England,’ which is, as she says “an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings … We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.” The lesson of her experience, which she makes clear and states openly, is not to confuse our ideas of something with the thing itself. The gap between them is too wide, and the stakes are too high.

One such falconry print from (appropriately) The British Museum

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I’ve seen some people on the Book Internet use the term ‘mood reader,’ a label for people who read according to their moods. To be glib, this feels like an invented Internet category to make people feel part of something, but is actually just a description of the overall human experience. Aren’t we all mood readers? Unless we have a job or external commitments related to reading, I would have to assume every single person who chooses to read books as a hobby, as a distraction, or to learn, is reading according to their mood in one way or another. In some seasons more than others, of course. Or I’m wrong and there is a strong contingent of Vulcan-like readers who can separate their feelings from their pastimes.

So, if you’re in the mood for something beautiful, meditative, and well-crafted, H is for Hawk is waiting for you.

On the other hand, maybe books aren’t working for you. H is also for help, after all. Here are three things that have helped recently:

1. Making kimchi, the easiest pickles to assemble, requires mostly chopping and no oven. It takes a few hours, most of which is downtime, and then it requires you to use your hands a lot and get them very messy. Once you’re done, you have kimchi.
   

2. Going to the nearest sauna. There are a lot of bougie spas where a person with a poreless face can walk you through a cold plunge. Or you can drag your friends to a community center with a small but clean sauna and showers. Your phone is in a locker for over an hour and the eavesdropping is better.
   

3. Taking a field trip. Some friends organized a trip to see some public art on the other side of the city. In the depths of winter it’s rare to exceed a 30-minute walking radius from one’s home, so the strategy here is to go to another part of town and treat yourself like a fourth grader on a field trip.
   

4. Cross-stitch. My brother is an avid stitcher, and he sent me a care package of a design he made on Floss Cross, along with the essentials to get started, and then set up a time to video call to show me how to get started. I can’t think of a kinder gesture of care. The mortifying ordeal of being known is so worth it.

1. Credit where it’s due: the book was recommended to me by this newsletter’s patron saint, an actual birder, and my decreasingly single housemate Alanna