by Helen Macdonald
Great book. I found it through a Reddit thread about grief and the death of a parent. It didn’t deal with loss quite as directly as I expected, but it showed how obsession can become a vessel for grief — how training a goshawk became a form of both escape and transformation.
The way she threads in T.H. White’s The Goshawk — with his own hidden pain and repression — is brilliant. It makes the book as much about the heritage of pain as it is about birds.
I called my twin sister the day after reading the funeral scene. I was in Utah on a snowboarding trip with SG and BH, thinking about leaving an impact — about who shows up at your funeral.
Grief and Disorientation
“I smiled for the first time, then, I think, since the phone call. Partly because the water was sliding down to the sea and this simple physics still made sense when the rest of the world didn’t.”
“After the funeral I went back to Cambridge. I didn’t sleep. I drove around a lot. I stared at the sun going down and the sun coming up, and the sun in between. … For weeks I felt I was made of dully burning metal. That’s what it was like; I was convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that if you’d put me on a bed or a chair I would have burned right through.”
“The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane.”
“The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.”
“I know now that I’m not trusting anyone or anything any more. And that it is hard to live for long periods without trusting anyone or anything. It’s like living without sleep; eventually it will kill you.”
Wildness and Control
“The places I know in England… it feels to me the wildest. It’s rich with the sense of an alternative countryside history; not just the grand, leisured dreams of landed estates, but a history of industry, forestry, disaster, commerce and work.”
“Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands. The wild can be human work.”
“She opened her wings and in a second was gone. … It was as if she’d found a rent in the damp Gloucestershire air and slipped through it.”
“The record of an intense clash of wills in which the pride and endurance of the wild raptor are worn down and broken by the almost insane willpower of the schoolmaster falconer.”
“Hawks cannot be punished. They would rather die than submit. Patience is my only weapon. Patience. Derived from patior. Meaning to suffer. It is an ordeal. I shall triumph.”
“The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.”
“But unlike other animals that have lived in such close proximity to man, they have never been domesticated. … a powerful symbol of wildness … of things that need to be mastered and tamed.”
“Some part of me that was very small and old had known this — some part of me that didn’t work according to the everyday rules of the world but with the logic of myths and dreams.”
Human Isolation and Connection
“Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude.”
“And I was sure that it was the drink that irrigated White’s constant self-sabotage… for it is a common trait of alcoholics to make plans and promises, to oneself, to others, fervently, sincerely, and in hope of redemption.”
“The smile of the placator. It is a smile that is a veneer on murder.”
“Like women, Goshawks were inexplicable. Sulky. Flighty and hysterical. Their moods were pathological. They were beyond all reason.”
“She’d borne my grief-spurred strangenesses with great good grace over the last few months but nothing could have prepared her for this.”
“He was offering to help, and I was unprepared for how this made me feel. … I felt weak with relief at not having to be an expert any more. … I gratefully stepped into novicehood again, as if I had never seen a hawk in my life.”
“In a fit of bitter misery I make a fort out of an old cardboard wardrobe box in the spare room upstairs and crawl inside. … I’m not going mad, I tell myself. I’m ill. That is all.”
Glimpses of Recovery
“It strikes me that this must be happiness. That I have remembered what it is, and how it can be done.”
“So now the hawk eats, the conversation continues, the sun falls in pale planes on the ancient walls, the chirrups of house martins drift down from above like distant fingertips on glass, and I glory in it all.”
“We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.”
“Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes.”
“And me? I do not know. I feel hollow and unhoused, an airy, empty wasps’ nest, a thing made of chewed paper after the frosts have murdered the life within.”
“I love Mabel, but what passes between us is not human. There is a kind of coldness that allows interrogators to put cloth over the mouths of men and pour water into their lungs, and lets them believe this is not torture”
Reflection
H is for Hawk is about the long migration through grief — from numbness to obsession to something like peace.
Macdonald doesn’t conquer wildness or grief; she learns to live beside both, watching how patience and attention can make even suffering take flight.