Excerpt from Diary of a Left-Handed Birdwatcher

It's hard to get to sleep. I'm in a strange place, reliving a strange event. Gradually, as I lie there staring at the moonscape of the ceiling, a resolution forms in my mind. I see that I want to show why it is that a comfort-loving man can find himself running through a night-shrouded marsh far from home, in pursuit of a small bird. And I see also that to put this into words will require more than a few good reasons. For my experience is one of those that defy good reasons and the language of good reasons. I will have to be the complete opportunist, calling upon other voices, upon stories, dreams, inventions. I will have to call upon poetry, the ancient art so useful for expressing the power and meaning of birds in our lives.

I see a book already. It is beautifully bound in royal blue, my name and the title printed in gilt on the spine. I can't make out the title, and from that strange failure I deduce I am sleeping at last and that this is all a dream.

I tell two people of the project: my wife and Lewis-can I say this?-my ornithologist.

My wife, no birdwatcher, approves but thinks it somewhat ambitious for a man supposedly enjoying the golden leisure of retirement. "After all," she says, not looking up from her embroidery, "you're only trying to explain the mystery of epiphany." I let her irony glide by, holding only to the lovely word "epiphany," which resonates into the silence that follows. It seems like a term I sought without knowing I sought it.

Lewis also approves but is, as a scientist should be, skeptical of my going at an already elusive subject with no procedure to guide me, no systematic way of acquiring data on which to base a hypothesis and no apparent means of testing any hypothesis I might come up with. "Why don't you put it in a poem?" he asks. After all these years, I still can't tell when he's serious.

"It won't fit," I reply vaguely.

"Well, it sounds to me like you're turning a nice hobby into a religious experience."

"Some birdwatching is, I suppose, a hobby, along with collecting matchbooks and building boats in bottles." My response sounds pettish, even to my own ear. "What I mean is something deeper, more intense, than a hobby."

"Show me!" Lewis says.

Copyright © 1996 by Leonard Nathan. All rights reserved.