Mirkwood

Sam Keen’s lovely book of autobiographical essays on birding was released in September last year. The full title is Sightings: Extraordinary Encounters with Ordinary Birds. Accompanied by delicate watercolor-like illustrations by Mary Woodin, Keen talks of birding as a religious experience. According to him, modern birders, though they do not worship birds, resemble a “neo-pagan cult, practitioners of a theology of nature.” He begins by writing about his childhood experiences when, dissatisfied and puzzled by the church that he attended as a child, he began to look to birding as his spiritual refuge.

Keen’s musings on birding and spirituality are very charming and it is clear that he has visited the matter frequently, having been a professor of philosophy and religion. I think that they will resonate with readers who do not have a scientific background, but to someone with more than a passing interest in biology, they might leave a tiny bit to be desired. I do not mean to say this as a knock on the book, because I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and believe that a writer must not be asked to tailor his output for anyone. I am concerned however, that with all the essays extolling the spiritual relevance of the birding experience, it might seem that this is the definitive purpose, if not the only purpose of birding and that the more technical aspects of ornithology are not sufficiently charming except to the specialist.

That minor quibble apart, the essays and their well-placed illustrations make for quiet, pleasurable reading and are excellent companions over a cup of hot afternoon tea (to those who have the luxury of enjoying a cup of hot afternoon tea away from work. I happen to have devoured it in three readings, mostly in the dead of night. Now, I read some of the essays again at my leisure.). One of my favorite essays is the piece about the northern cardinal. Keen writes about Miss Beach, a young art teacher in his school who accompanied the teenage author on his birding jaunts and shared a beautiful secret relationship with him. He says he was never very good at art, and a misshapen cardinal that he had drawn in her class became a token of their shared love of birdwatching. For many years after the boy left his small town, Miss Beach would write lavishly illustrated letters about her bird sightings, sometimes drawing a cardinal in the place of a return address on the envelope. It is impossible to remain unmoved while reading The Everlasting Cardinal.

Most of the essays concern experiences with fairly common birds of the backyard, the shore and the city such as turkeys, sparrows, thrushes, hawks and Keen revels in the enjoyment and amusement of observing and being observed. He writes that his love affair with birds was ignited by a sighting of the indigo bunting:

The bunting was the first of many slant revelations and incarnate metaphors that spoke to me of the primal sacredness of life. They form the basis of my creed as expressed by D.H. Lawrence: “There is a sixth sense, the natural religious sense, the sense of wonder”.

Many of us have this recollection of the one bird we have seen that first piqued our interest in birding as an activity. I would love to think that my subconscious mind was entranced by the peacocks who roamed the parks where the young parents took a stroll with a two-year-old inside a pram, but this is too good to be true. I remember nothing of the peacocks though I recall the blue-white pram quite vividly. What I do remember is that, as an eleven-year-old member of the school’s World Wide Fund for Nature, I went to a lake out of town. There by the lakeshore, shortly before we camped, we saw a solitary pink flamingo in the failing light.

Roark went to see the picture. It was still Vesta, as he had seen her last. She had lost nothing and learned nothing. She had not learned the proper camera angles, she had not learned the correct screen makeup; her mouth was too large, her cheeks too gaunt, her hair uncombed, her movements too jerky and angular. She was like nothing ever seen in a film before, she was a contradiction to all standards, she was awkward, crude, shocking, she was like a breath of fresh air. The studio had expected her to be hated; she was suddenly worshipped by the public. She was not pretty, nor gracious, nor gentle, nor sweet; she played the part of a young girl not as a tubercular flower, but as a steel knife. A reviewer said that she was a cross between a medieval pageboy and a gun moll. She achieved the incredible: she was the first woman who ever allowed herself to make strength attractive on the screen.

- [Ayn Rand, Unpublished Work, Later appeared in The Early Ayn Rand - A selection from her unpublished fiction (reference via Valda Redfern)]

The fascinating character of Vesta Dunning was edited out of the final version of The Fountainhead. Ayn Rand dispensed with her and perhaps compensated by transferring some of her personality to Dominique Francon, the book’s heroine . Nevertheless, many people, even those who have never heard of Rand, have seen Vesta on the silver screen. The young Katharine Hepburn, who predated The Fountainhead by a few years, fit Rand’s description so perfectly that one could be forgiven for thinking that Rand had modeled Vesta after her. Hepburn would have been 100 today.

Kate was the original firebrand, an eccentric who refused to play the Hollywood game. I tend to like her more in her early flops : Christopher Strong, Bringing Up Baby, Stage Door, and Holiday, than in her early hits: The Philadelphia Story, Woman of the Year. I did, of course, like The African Queen enough to have watch it twice in a row. I think that post-1940, Hepburn’s roles, either deliberately or not, became more conformist, less provocative and less interesting. In these films, the female lead starts out as a refreshing contrast to the shy, forlorn, submissive damsel, but towards the end, she is tamed and subordinated to the male character. It is as if RKO and all the big studios abandoned the sense of danger associated with Garbo, Davis, Dietrich and Hepburn and gave in, wholesale, to the easy and accessible charms of Shirley Temple.

Most of these films were seen at the behest of my roommate, who got me interested in classic films when we were graduate students in Minneapolis. Every week, we requested a classic film from the public library, sometimes as old as the 1920s and 30s, and watched it on Saturday night. In between watching classics like Ben Hur, The Best Years of our Lives, Dr. Zhivago, The King and I, and Casablanca, we had a Kate Hepburn movie as often as we could. It would be unfair to close this post without referring to the site from which we got our information and our recommendations. We referred extensively (and almost exclusively) to ReelClassics.com, a very large database of classic movies, and actors and actress from the Golden Age of Hollywood. It defies belief that all that information has been compiled by only one person. Elizabeth’s site was a great resource for us, and her recommendations were always spot on.

Disconnected thoughts:

1. If you want a surprise, try the geeky and often overlooked comedy, The Desk Set, which pits a librarian (Hepburn) against an engineer (Spencer Tracy) in a story about the fear of computers replacing human staff in large enterprises. It is not a very well-known film, but it is a hoot from start to finish.
2. When one reads about Hepburn’s landmark films, everyone talks about The Philadelphia Story, but there is rarely a mention of Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962), a three-hour film adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s tragedy of a family coming apart. Kate’s tormented performance as an unhappy mother and morphine addict was probably her best work after 1950. It was the only Hepburn film that I found difficult to watch.