Other Echoes

Posted by Maria Popova

https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/06/29/william-henry-hudson-idle-days-in-patagonia/

https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=85478

“The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” wrote Milton in Paradise Lost. Because the mind (which may in the end be a full-body phenomenon) is the cup that lifts the world to our lips to be tasted — a taste we call reality — it is difficult to examine the cup itself, to observe the inner workings of the mind as it sips questions and turns them over with the tongue of thought to form ideas, to render a world. We can’t will it, because the will is a handmaiden of the mind; we can only surrender to it, and never willingly, when something unexpected — a grave illness, a great loss, a great love — vanquishes the tranquilizing effect of habit, jolts us awake from the trance of near-living, and makes us see reality afresh, purified and magnified.

No one, to my mind, has articulated those vivifying interruptions more powerfully — or more delightfully — than William Henry Hudson (August 4, 1841–August 18, 1922).

Born in Argentina as Guillermo Enrique Hudson, he lost his mother when he was only a teenager. Darwin had just published On the Origin of Species. The disconsolate boy devoured it immediately — it must have been a salve, this beautiful and brutal model of nature in which the survival of the species is perfected by the deaths of individuals. Like the young John James Audubon, who turned to birds in the wake of losing his own mother, Hudson — who would eventually become the Audubon of the pampas — grew passionately interested in ornithology. He resented the way science was done, killing living birds to make “skins” for study; he resented the way civilization was done, destroying wildlife habitats for human needs. He felt the urgency and ecstasy of a calling — to enchant the world with the wondrous birds of Patagonia he had spent his youth observing, taking meticulous notes about their morphology, habits, and migration patterns, thinking constantly about what it is like to be a creature so profoundly other.

In his early thirties, Hudson sailed for England, eager to share what he knew of a feathered universe entirely alien to the European mind.

He reached out to John Gould — the Old World’s preeminent ornithologist, a disaffected taxidermist who had risen to fame largely thanks to his wife’s extraordinary ornithological art — and received a curt rejection.

Unable to find work, he folded his gaunt six-foot frame into a giant origami bird to sleep on the benches of Hyde Park.

It took him two years to get a paying job as a writer — for a women’s magazine, under the pseudonym Maud Merryweather. He wrote the way he felt the living world — passionately, rigorously, his tender curiosity shimmering with awe.

Doors began to crack open and he was soon writing for other small journals. For fifteen years, he trojan-horsed birds into popular interest stories, until he finally published his first book of ornithology, about the birds of Argentina. He was forty-seven.

Then the floodgates opened and out came pouring some of the most breathtaking nature writing our civilization has produced. Hemingway cited Hudson in his novels. Joseph Conrad marveled that his prose was “like the grass that the good God made to grow and when it was there you could not tell how it came.” By the end of Hudson’s life, his collected works — dozens of ornithological books and natural history essays, novels and travelogues, written with a philosopher’s quickening of mind and poet’s sensitivity to the light of the world — amounted to twenty-four volumes.

Shortly after his death, he was honored with a bird sanctuary memorial in his name in Hyde Park, not far from the bench that had held his dreams as a homeless young writer.

What shaped Hudson’s gift for channeling the beating heart of nature, for rendering the living world in such exultant and exacting detail, was the ruin of his best laid plans — an accident that befell him in Patagonia just before he left Argentina for good. Pulsating through it is the reminder that every loss of control is an invitation to surrender, and it is only in surrender that we break out of our stories to contact a deeper truth — about ourselves, about the world, about the interchange between the two that we call reality.

Not long after turning thirty, determined to make a name for himself as an ornithologist, Hudson set out on a yearlong observing expedition from the pampas to Tierra del Fuego, across the austere scrub and cold canyons of the Patagonian desert. Recounting the experience a lifetime later in his altogether magnificent 1893 book Idle Days in Patagonia (public domain), he reflects on the spirit in which he entered upon the adventure:

To my mind there is nothing in life so delightful as that feeling of relief, of escape, and absolute freedom which one experiences in a vast solitude, where man has perhaps never been, and has, at any rate, left no trace of his existence.

But things did not go as planned from the outset. The southbound steamer he boarded in Buenos Aires ran aground in the middle of the second night. Hudson awoke to find himself beached on the Patagonian coast. Too restless to wait for rescue, he decided to trek inland in search of human habitation, which the octogenarian captain had assured him was near.

After two days of walking, without provisions or a map, he came upon a gasp of a vista — the Rio Negro river snaking across the desert, “broader than the Thames at Westminster, and extending away on either hand until it melted and was lost in the blue horizon, its low shores clothed in all the glory of groves and fruit orchards and vineyards and fields of ripening maize.”

He eventually made it to a farmhouse laden with fruit that “glowed like burning coals in the deep green foliage.” After replenishing his energies, he set out on the first leg of the expedition proper — an eighty-mile ride along the river — accompanied by a young Englishman.

They stopped midway at a “rude little cabin,” in “a dreary and desolate spot, with a few old gaunt and half-dead red willows for only trees.” One hot afternoon, bored and birdless, Hudson picked up his companion’s revolver to examine it. It went off immediately, sending a bullet through his left knee. Blood came streaming, more blood than he had ever seen.

The young man, afraid that Hudson would die without medical care, decided to ride out in search of rescue. He left Hudson a jug of water, locked him in the windowless cabin “to prevent the intrusion of unwelcome prowlers,” and promised to return before nightfall. He didn’t. When darkness came, it was total — Hudson had no candle. Shivering with pain under his blood-soaked poncho, finding that he could “neither doze nor think,” all he could do was listen. And yet he did think, a lovely thought about the importance of hearing to unsighted people and animals dwelling in the dark — one of those sudden flashes of empathy for otherness that our own suffering can spark.

Suddenly he registered a strange sound, as if someone were dragging a rope across the clay floor. He lit one of his few matches and looked around, but saw nothing, and so he passed the “black anxious hours” with his mind’s ear pressed to the world outside the cabin, until he could hear the emissaries of dawn — the scissor-tail tyrant birds twittering in the willow, the red-billed finches singing in the reeds, a song that sounded like crying.

But none was more assuring, more life-affirming than “the dreamy, softly rising and falling, throaty warblings of the white-rumped swallow”:

A loved and beautiful bird is this, that utters his early song circling round and round in the dusky air, when the stars begin to pale; and his song, perhaps, seems sweeter than all others, because it corresponds in time to that rise in the temperature and swifter flow of the blood — the inward resurrection experienced on each morning of our individual life.

As day at last began to break, an enormous venomous snake slithered out from under his poncho — it had slept beside him all night.

The young Englishman returned in the morning with an oxcart that took Hudson, over two delirious days along a hot dusty road, to the headquarters of the South American Missionary Society. There he remained bedridden for months, his dreams crushed, his expedition foreclosed before it had begun. With no birds to observe, Hudson began examining the very instrument of observation.

A generation before Virginia Woolf wrote so movingly about illness as a portal to self-understanding, Hudson found in his incapacitation, in the devastation of his plans, what we always find when we are forced to halt our ordinary methods of avoiding ourselves — an unbidden opening into the nature of the mind, into that glowing space between the mechanics of cognition and the mystery of consciousness, articulated in the language of his heart: birds.

He writes:

Lying helpless on my back through the long sultry mid-summer days, with the white-washed walls of my room for landscape and horizon, and a score or two of buzzing house-flies, perpetually engaged in their intricate airy dance, for only company, I was forced to think on a great variety of subjects, and to occupy my mind with other problems than that of migration. These other problems, too, were in many ways like the flies that shared my apartment, and yet always remained strangers to me, as I to them, since between their minds and mine a great gulf was fixed. Small unpainful riddles of the earth; flitting, sylph-like things, that began life as abstractions, and developed, like imago from maggot, into entities: I always flitted among them, as they performed their mazy dance, whirling in circles, falling and rising, poised motionless, then suddenly cannoning against me for an instant, mocking my power to grasp them, and darting off again at a tangent. Baffled I would drop out of the game, like a tired fly that goes back to his perch, but like the resting, restive fly I would soon turn towards them again; perhaps to see them all wheeling in a closer order, describing new fantastic figures, with swifter motions, their forms turned to thin black lines, crossing and recrossing in every direction, as if they had all combined to write a series of strange characters in the air, all forming a strange sentence — the secret of secrets! Happily for the progress of knowledge only a very few of these fascinating elusive insects of the brain can appear before us at the same time: as a rule we fix our attention on a single individual, like a falcon amid a flight of pigeons or a countless army of small field finches; of a dragon-fly in the thick of a cloud of mosquitoes, or infinitesimal sand-flies. Hawk and dragon-fly would starve if they tried to capture, or even regarded, more than one at a time.

Hudson sometimes hobbled out of his room with a stick to talk to people, but although he listened earnestly “to the story of their small un-avian affairs,” he had never found it easy to connect with humans:

I could always quit them without regret to lie on the green sward, to gaze up into the trees or the blue sky, and speculate on all imaginable things.

With the distance of a lifetime, he would look back on the experience as a microcosm of life itself, in which it never the execution of our plans but their interruption, those rude demolitions of the maquette we mistake for reality, that leaves us most profoundly transformed, deepened, magnified:

Our waking life is sometimes like a dream, which proceeds logically enough until the stimulus of some new sensation, from without or within, throws it into temporary confusion, or suspends its action; after which it goes on again, but with fresh characters, passions, and motives, and a changed argument.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/06/29/william-henry-hudson-idle-days-in-patagonia/

https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=85478

Posted by Maria Popova

https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/06/27/anima-kapka-kassabova/

https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=85462

“All our lives we perform tasks while waiting for something to click into place. For somewhere to put our love.”

Every day at sundown I would hear him, the invisible shepherd singing on the other side of the ridge, his song filling the gloaming with the sound of the centuries — the same song his father had sung on that same mountain, and his father’s father, and the generations of shepherds before him, their lives wool on the loom of time weaving the story of a place that is a scale model of the world.

The Bulgaria I grew up in was the poorest country in Europe and the most biodiverse per square kilometer. I spent much of my childhood in its remotest mountains, where my grandparents worked as government-deployed elementary school teachers in largely illiterate villages. My grandmother, now ninety, had grown up in those mountains herself, sharing a single straw bed with her three siblings and a three-room house with her trigenerational family of twelve. There were always animals around — pigs and chickens and goat and cows and oh so many sheep — their rhythms, their needs, their moods intertwined with our own. I feel their absence today and in it a reminder that the world we live in — a world of skyscrapers and screens, sterilized of the nonhuman — is unnatural, impoverished, lonely.

After coming of age in New Zealand and living in Scotland, poet and novelist Kapka Kassabova returned to Bulgaria, where she was born a decade before me, to live in its mountains with the nomadic Karakachan shepherds and their ancient breed of dogs in a remote village brought back from the brink of oblivion by a small retinue of young idealists. The modest life of physical toil and privation recompenses her with a new understanding of the tessellated meanings of loyalty, courage, and love, of what it means to be human and how, once we strip the constellation of complexities and artifices that is the modern self, we can begin to see the world as a whole simpler than its parts, unfinished yet complete. Pouring from the pages of Anima: A Wild Pastoral (public library) — one of those books that leave you taking fuller breaths of life — is an elixir to lift the spell that has us entranced by the cult of more, languishing with the loneliness of not enough in a civilization obsessed with scaling business models, having forgotten that the only thing worth scaling is a mountain. It is a love letter to the Karakachan way of being — to the shepherds who in a lifetime of walking with the animals circumambulate the world more than once with their combined footfall, and to their guard dogs who look part wolf and part teddy bear, their growl a volcano erupting in space, their eyes earnest and knowing; it is a love letter to life itself, to the soul of the world coursing through us, the soul beneath the self.

Kassabova writes:

This job requires three things: liking your own company, liking the animals and liking the outdoors, plus not being afraid of anything.

[…]

We have forgotten that this too is something we can do… walk with animals, live with animals, care for animals and be cared for by them. Even make a living from it. Today, it is just as difficult to make a living from pastoral farming as it is from making noncommercial art, music or literature. You must be fuelled by a devotion that can’t be dampened by rain or burned up by fire.

Those who are willing to live such a life are rewarded with a singular sense of purpose, more transcendence than teleology — a kind of repatriation into the family of things, a benediction of time and a consecration of presence:

It was a soothing monastic monotony, a balm for troubled souls, to know your purpose, follow an itinerary and bring the gang back, tired and satisfied after another day of fulfilling your mission. The days were beads in a rosary that passed through your fingers and you felt their texture and shape. The same, but different.

Morning prayer: milk the sheep and take the flock to pasture. Midday prayer: pladnina. Evening vespers: bring the flock home, feed the dogs. Have a humble supper, lie on your hard bed, then rise early and morning prayer.

Drink your coffee, lace up your shoes, strap on your rucksack, take your stick and in sickness and in health, in rain and sunshine, go. The dogs are waiting. The flock is waiting. The hills are waiting. You are needed.

She comes to contact the life-force of water in Black River and the consolation of stone in Thunder Peak. In that way we have of calling love the longing for our own missing pieces — those parts of ourselves we have repressed or abandoned that another embodies — she falls in love with one of the young shepherds, only to discover alongside his extraordinary vitality the self-abandonment of addiction. She wanders the last indigenous pine forests of the Balkans, slakes her soul on a river so icy blue and clean it feels “like the dawn of the earth,” eats with elders who know the real meaning of might: “There are hundred-year-old trees,” say the Karakachans, “but there is no hundred-year-old power.”

All the while, the life of the mountain whispers its invitation to aliveness. In a passage evocative of the French surrealist poet, philosopher, and novelist René Daumal’s alpine metaphor for the meaning of life, she writes:

You go up, always up. There is something higher, brighter, more saturated in colour, more perfect in shape, different from yesterday, although it’s the same mountain every day. The dogs are by your side, they too are astonished by this moving picture and sometimes when you walk, you feel so light that your feet barely touch the ground, and you realise that these are some of the happiest days of your life.

One of the hardest things to learn in this life — in this epoch, in this civilization — is that all true happiness is the work of unselfing, the kind of surrender to the will of being that some find in a monastery and some in a mountain. Two centuries after Margaret Fuller’s encountered transcendence on a hilltop, Kassabova recounts a moment of pure presence pulsating with the essence of anima — the Latin root of “animal,” meaning “soul,” which the Karakachans believe is embodied by the wind, the breath of life:

I have no face or body when I lie like this on the boundless bed of the hills, I have nothing at all. I am a vessel through which passes the breath of the world.

[…]

The wind is a messenger travelling from afar and I try to catch the message. Like a word that’s not a word, it is a continuous movement of grass and light, of animals and the sun’s orbit. The wind is alive like a being. The wind is the world’s soul passing over me and its message is this, the world’s soul. Anima.

It passes over us when we lie down with the animals. It touches us and moves on. I don’t know where it goes but one day, I will go with it and not wake up anymore.

Such glimpses of the fathomless totality beyond this boundary of skin and story that we call a self wake us up from the illusion we live with. There are infinitely many peepholes into that grander reality, the smallest flower as good as the largest telescope, a hare as good as a hummingbird. Kassabova reflects on hers:

To keep up with the goats required surrender and a suspension of self, at least self in the modern sense, the self that demands to be at the centre of things and not a companion to a bunch of other animals. But maybe the modern self is not quite real. Maybe its understanding of centre and periphery is an illusion. Maybe it wouldn’t be that difficult to give it up. It might be a relief.

She finds this unselfing to be an exponential surrender — to the mountain, to its time and its timefulness:

The higher you went, the harder physical survival became, the more equal you felt to everything. Personas disappeared and essence remained. There is just one essence in all of life. Anima.

[…]

All our lives, we try to arrive somewhere. Where are my ambitions now? I can’t find them. They were never real. How can something unreal take up so much of my time on earth when the only thing that’s real is this mountain? I can’t fathom it. Pirin was named after the old divinity of thunder and fertility, Perun, who is covered in dragon scales. I can see why humans worshipped mountains when they wandered over nine mountains with their flocks. Thunder Peak is the original cathedral. When Notre Dame burns, Thunder Peak is here every morning.

In the end, she discovers what we all do if we live long enough and deep enough — that it is not what we search for but what finds us, what comes unbidden through the side door of our expectations, through the cracks in our plans, that most rewilds our lives with meaning. And that meaning is always inarticulable, something glowing in the abyss between one consciousness and another, something on which language can only shine a sidewise gleam.

I open my laptop and my fingers struggle to type. They are too thick and have almost forgotten their way around the keyboard. Must I squeeze my experiences into such a small space when they are so much larger? As large and layered as the mountain. I look the same as ever, but I feel like a giant. Something has expanded. I don’t know how to explain this. Between the lower world and the upper world there is a problem of language.

And all the time, the earth is trying to make contact.

[…]

The milk, the blood, the rain. All our lives we perform tasks while waiting for something to click into place. For somewhere to put our love.

[…]

Now… I understand what it’s like to have seen something so true and beautiful, you want everyone to be touched by it. Saved, even.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

newsletter

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/06/27/anima-kapka-kassabova/

https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=85462