![]() The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. When I hear it resounding through the woods, and then the five black pellets of its song dropping like stones into the air, I know I am standing at the edge of the mystery, in which terror is naturally and abundantly part of life, part of even the most becalmed, intelligent, sunny life - as, for example, my own. But the scream of the owl, which is not of pain and hopelessness and the fear of being plucked out of the world, but of the sheer rollicking glory of the death-bringer, is more terrible still. In the night, when the owl is less than exquisitely swift and perfect, the scream of the rabbit is terrible. ![]() ![]() ![]() In an essay about owls - which, like all excellent essays, fans out fractally from its subject to become about something else, something elemental and existential - Oliver reflects on these mysterious and astonishing creatures as she wanders the woodlands of Provincetown near her home, searching for the nest of the great horned owl, “this bird with the glassy gaze, restless on the bough, nothing but blood on its mind.” She writes: (Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy.) Owls from Richard Lydekker’s 1893 natural history of owls. This essential battery is what Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) - a Rilke for our own time: a rare philosopher-poet of immense and tender attentiveness to the living world and to our human interiority - explores in one of the pieces collected in the 2003 treasure Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays ( public library). And like all that is true of nature, this duality of beauty and terror is also true of the subset of nature comprising our experience - the subset we call human nature: When happiness comes at us unbidden and elemental, there is almost a terror to its coming - to the totality of it, to the way it submerges and saturates and supinates us with something vast and uncontrollable and sublime, thrusting us past the limits of our longing. We see this everywhere in nature: Virginia Woolf captured it in her arresting account of a total solar eclipse, and Coleridge captured it in contemplating the interplay of terror and transcendence in a storm. “Go to the limits of your longing… Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror,” Rilke urged in his Book of Hours, his poetic cadence assuring us to “just keep going,” for “nearby is the country they call life.” Rilke sensed that, as the great naturalist John Muir observed a generation earlier, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” In such a universe, beauty is not so easily unhitched from terror - they coexist in one of those essential batteries whose two poles, like fear and hope, charge life with meaning, with aliveness.
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