life would ever be made precious to me

M. said that he wondered if he was losing his old passions, and I began to talk about J.A. Baker and The Peregrine, a book that I picked up almost by chance at a library book sale where the people in charge suspected that I was buying the books to resell them. My copy is not the recent New York Review of Books reissue but a secondhand 1970 Penguin, white, black, orange, thin, and plain. The book was first published in 1967. Baker himself was born in 1926 and is assumed to have died at some point during the 1980s. He spent years exploring a piece of Essex fenland, watching for peregrines, following them, stationing himself in trees, and imagining how the world must look, to them, from the air.

I found myself crouching over the kill like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned quickly about, alert for the walking heads of men. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts. I looked into the wood. In a lair of shadow the peregrine was crouching, watching me, gripping the neck of a dead branch. We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life.

The birds were Baker's passion. He opens the book with a sketch of his intentions and goes on to describe the peregrine in a methodical way, telling the reader that the female bird is "between 17 and 20 inches long: roughly the length of a man's arm from elbow to fingertip" while males "are 3 to 4 inches shorter." "Weights also vary." The rest of the book is written in the form of journal entries. In most of the entries a peregrine appears, hunts, makes a kill, or misses, and leaves. In the next entry it appears again and hunts again. But there are these variations: the bird appears in a different place, it kills a different species, the weather is rainy one day, sunny another, it is a "frosty day, fading from brightness slowly, hour by hour," or there is "hot sun and cooling breeze, the North Sea flat and shining." December 22nd is "The shortest day: dull, cold, with a sudden flare of sunlight before dusk." In winter the ground is covered with snow, and the birds are dying. I remembered the dead birds in Gormenghast: "In the wide, white fields that surrounded the castle, the birds lay dead or leaned sideways stiffening for death. Here and there was the movement of a bird limping, or the last frantic fluttering of a small ice-gummed wing." In the Peregrine, too, birds freeze: "Near the brook a heron lay in frozen stubble. Its wings were stuck to the ground by frost, and the mandibles of its bill were frozen together." So it wasn't an exaggeration of Peake's after all.

Reading through these days of routinely appearing and vanishing peregrines I thought about the kind of repetition that can make aboriginal Australian song-poetry seem aimless or enigmatic when it's translated into English. There's this Baby Cockatoos, recorded and translated by RMW Dixon, spoken by a Jirru man named Pompey Clumppoint:

Waiting hopefully in the end of a hollow log
They swallow noisily, their voices beg

Waiting hopefully in the end of a hollow log
They swallow noisily, their voices beg
For the food their mother brings

Waiting hopefully in the end of a hollow log
They swallow noisily, their voices beg
For the food their mother brings

In life, off the page, there must have been movements and inflections to go with this, an atmosphere that disappears when you remove it into a book. Baker, the Englishman, coming from a cultural background of books, a book-nation, does the song-dance in prose, and the inflections that would give me his character and his purpose are contained in his language: he is dumb for me, he is invisible (and dead now too: dead as the partridge on page 112, dead as the beak-lanced curlew on page 80), yet he speaks, he describes --

A cock blackbird, yellow-billed, stared with bulging crocus eye, like a small, mad puritan ...

What was left [of a newly dead gull] smelt fresh and sweet, like a mash of raw beef and pineapple.

Trees by the brook were grey with a lichen of woodpigeons.

There are different ways of making sense.

The crow-catchers of Königsberg kill their prey in the same way [as the peregrine]. Having decoyed the crows into their nets, they kill them by biting them in the neck, severing the spinal cord with their teeth.

Writing for readers who are invisible to him, who might be sitting distantly in a city, at home, indoors, or overseas, he can't, like Pompey Clumppoint, assume that the audience is so familiar with his birds that they can fill in the details for themselves, so Baker has to explain, and the explaining fills the book.

When a wader would not move, they [red-legged partridges] tried to walk over it. For a bird there are only two sorts of bird: their own sort, and those that are dangerous. No others exist. The rest are just harmless objects, like stones, or trees, or men when they are dead.

His language is rapt and steady, as if all this is fate, but what if he hadn't discovered this passion for peregrines, I wonder: did he think of that, and did he fear it, the thought of ending up like Dorothea in Middlemarch, or derailed like Lydgate, a fear that George Eliot expresses more than once in her journals: the fear that she will do nothing worthwhile, that her life will be gone and the vital thing will not be done or found.

This is the last entry I mean to make in my old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva, in 1849. What moments of despair I passed through after that -- despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was the sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.