By Harold Rhenisch.
Begun 13 May 2009; finished 16 May.
For ‘10 Books From My Library’ reading challenge.
“The robins have an advantage over the cats: they see the whole scene … all at once. For them, there is only the flock. The individual robin itself — the bird that sees — is the only point of absence in the world: it is the other robins that are present. This kind of Stalinist social organization drives the predatory cats wild, for they are obsessed with presence, with strong borders mapped between the self and everything else. They are the great, Romantic individualists.” (p. 19)
“Geese are the border guards between Hungary and Austria in 1973. Their heads are full of maps about who lives where, what stamp they need on their visas, the countries you’d rather they didn’t live in, the countries you’d rather you didn’t live in. … The geese come in like Flying Fortresses on a bombing run over Hamburg. One particularly persistent pair has chosen the north shore of our lake. These two are the kind of geese who wear matching leather jackets from his amateur bowling league: she sits close to him, in the centre seat of the pickup, and his driving is not exactly straight. They have been coming in for years now — a big gander and his more dimunitive goose. He takes a 44 chest. He played football in high school. She’s a size 6 petite. In all this time … they have never raised a gosling on the lake. That’s a pretty impressive record.” (p. 61-62)
“The whole reason for the kafuffle was that the otters had shown up. Otters are the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police]. They are not birds. They don’t have a sense of humour.” (p. 76)
“The cranes return in the fall, when the air vibrates like a glass of red wine, a rounded mouthful of music in tones of copper and wool died with onionskins, chrysanthemums, and black currants. After the first frosts, the yellow leaves are streaming off the poplars so rapidly it sems they will never stop — as if in their shifting, musical rustle the tree is generating leaves as quickly as it casts them off. A thin skin of ice lays up in the bay, along and among the reeds. … When I hear the cries of the sandhill cranes today I am no longer standing in space, with evanescent gusts of time blowing over me, but am standing in time. It is a solid country. It is space that is a thin veil of cobwebs blowing in a cold October wind now, a thousand little tents of frost in the morning grass, vanishing as the day rises.” (p. 187-188)
“Suddenly [the owl] was there, in a tall dead aspen above the bulrushes. The moon floated behind her shoulder, huge and cold, rimmed by tiny prisms of broken light. The owl watched me without blinking and all time vanished. She stared at me for a million years.” (p. 209)
…And I can keep quoting luminous, entrancing prose from this luminous, entrancing book by Harold Rhenisch. Read the rest of this entry »