2019/43: H is for Hawk -- Helen Macdonald

I’d flown scores of hawks, and every step of their training was familiar to me. But while the steps were familiar, the person taking them was not. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. [p. 85]

Second try at this book: I suspect that, when I first started reading it, I found the author's emotional state (on the verge of breakdown after the sudden death of her father) a little too raw and relatable for my own mental wellbeing. I'm glad I returned.

H is for Hawk is a book about training a goshawk, building a relationship with a bird: it's also about T H White, who documented his own failed (and horrific) attempt to do the same; and it's about the author's grief and depression after the death of her beloved father. There are fascinating details about the history and culture of hawking, and the different species of hawks flown (but never domesticated, never tamed) by humans over the last 5,000 years.

T H White's The Goshawk recounts his lack of understanding of Gos, the hawk he tried to 'master'. His ignorance made him cruel -- though, as Helen Macdonald posits, there was a degree of sadism in his personality. I hadn't known much about White's life: he was homosexual, self-loathing, yearning for love and sabotaging his own successes. I felt immense sympathy for his hawk, and some compassion for White himself.

Quite aside from the raw emotions and the sense of exhaustion in Macdonald's account of her own goshawk, Mabel, there is some glorious nature-writing here: hawks on the wing 'loving the space between each other'; 'a torn-paper whiteness behind the sun that speaks of frost to come' ... And some melancholy observations, beautifully phrased, about the ways in which we are losing the wild, taming and destroying it. There are instincts still dormant in us, which can be woken by interaction with a wild thing: that are woken in Macdonald as she bonds with the alien creature on her glove.

I read this for the 'woman writing about nature' rubric in the 'Reading Women 2019' Challenge.