Jonathan Rosen, The Life of the Skies

Jonathan Rosen’s Life of the Skies is a wide-ranging and often brilliant exploration of the relationship between humans, birds, and the worlds of nature and culture in a way that birders will find convincing and non-birders truly eye-opening.

The breadth of topics covered here—from Ivory-billed Woodpeckers to Robert Frost, from sex-determined brain function to Sufi mysticism—is hardly susceptible to easy summation, but Rosen comes again and again to a convincing and “powerful sense that the human scene on the ground [is] just as remarkable and, more than that, an integral part of … birding”—and it is precisely that human scene, historical, cultural, biographical, and autobiographical that is explored here.

Life of the Skies is professedly not a history of birding, though the book’s first chapters recite severral of the great foundational narratives. Rosen goes beyond the familiar stories and personalities to offer penetrating analyses of other figures traditionally thought of, if at all, as peripheral to the history of birds in America. Particularly rewarding is the discussion of Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking,” a poem that in Rosen’s tour-de-force reading marks Whitman’s rejection of the romantic tradition, as he recognized, painfully, that true poetry arises not out of our experience of nature but out of our tragic awakening into dislocation. I would suggest that Robert Frost’s “Auspex,” likewise the subject of a thorough and thoroughly engaging explication here, is about the same matter: the lyrical voice of the poem, an anti-Ganymede, becomes a poet precisely because he is denied the unio mystica the appearance of the great dark bird at first promises.

As Rosen’s subtitle suggests, these past two centuries have seen nature so thoroughly civilized, and civilization so completely naturalized, that it is impossible to know where one begins and the other leaves off. The intellectual result, Rosen argues, is a sort of anxious solipsism, and birding overcomes that anxiety by both affirming the persistence of an external reality and reassuring us that we can participate in it. “Birdwatching,” says Rosen, “is all about the balance,” the re-establishment of an equilibrium between the internal complexities of human life and the external beingness of the world. As a “mediating” activity, birding both restores this balance and keeps us constantly aware of our need for it.

Rosen’s Part II, less rigorously structured and more miscellaneous, presents a series of examples of how birders and ornithologists have achieved that balance. The central figure discussed here is Alfred Russell Wallace, the inventor of biogeography and the ill-timed discoverer of the first principles of evolution. Reversing the great naturalist’s own perspective, Rosen compares Wallace’s relation to nature and culture to that of the Aru natives he “studied,” concluding that the “primitives” were in fact no closer to nature than Wallace—or than we are. We just inhabit a different “nature,” one that we are simultaneously a part of and apart from. Birding, in Jonathan Rosen’s formulation, is the attempt to reconcile those circumstances, to find a wholeness in all the fractured complexity of life. Often enough, it works.