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While editing Wall posts from back in 2002, in preparation for the “Wall book,” it struck me that in those early days I was more prone to shoot off quick, and shorter, posts than I do these days. There appears to have been some “good news/bad news” associated with that practice. The bad news was a number of typographical and usage errors that I now find unacceptable. The good news was that I would send you thoughts I found interesting without waiting for a full-blown essay to evolve. It is in the spirit of that “good news” that I send you this somewhat shorter post.
According to Wikipedia, “a polymath (Greek: πολυμαθής, polymathēs, "having learned much,” Latin: homo universalis, "universal man"]) is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas—such a person is known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.”
Left unaddressed in this definition is the question of just how many “maths” one needs to master before becoming a polymath. Three? Eight? A dozen? Having been math phobic from an early age, the question never arouse for me. However, I am concerned that this attention to the poly may blind us to the equally praiseworthy accomplishments of various “maths” less “poly” in nature.
I have been spending several hours a day in the company of one such - let us call her a “duomath": Helen Macdonald. Well, not in her actual “company.” The young woman doesn’t know me from Adam, nor I her, except for the acquaintance I can claim from listening to her read her book H is for Hawk. I am far from the first to notice that this is an exceptional book. It garnered her the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize, The Costa Book Award, and the 2016 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. So the first “math” of this duomath is that the young woman (born in 1970 - so young from my perspective) writes wonderfully well. She has an almost magical ability to use words in a way that allows us to see and feel the world through her senses. The prose becomes poetry, without the cloying pretension that can subvert a work so artfully crafted as Hawk. And I should note that my perspective is honed from a long lifetime of reading (born in 1948 and still counting - so long from my perspective) at a pace many would find borderline obsessive. It is not unusual for me to read a book a day, and I always have at least a couple open somewhere. So let me assert in a phrase some will find both ageist and sexist— the girl can flat out write!
It is the second math in combination with the first that is making my current experience unique. Ms. Macdonald reads the book herself. This is most often the kiss of death in the evolving world of audiobooks. An author somewhere becomes convinced that only they can give life to the “inner voice” of their successful work, somewhere a producer caves, and somewhere a possibly decent audiobook dies. It is true the Ms. Macdonald is by far the dominant voice in the work. The only exception being the occasional, brief appearance of T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King and fellow falconer. So Macdonald avoids the quicksand of a multi-voiced drama. That being said, let me again opine — the girl can flat out read!
So what is the bad news? There is some. We need to keep in mind that the work has been called a "misery memoir.” And it is a dissection of despair, a tapestry that Macdonald wove from the varied threads created by the grief she felt at her father’s untimely death and the simultaneous existential challenges and revelations manifest in the training Mabel, her goshawk - the most intractable of all raptors. It is important, I believe, to assert that she did not write this book for us. In all likelihood she probably did not want to write this book. Rather it seems she had to write the book in order to master her soul, to move past her past into a future beyond one of numbing grief.
It is in her moments of deepest revelation that I am reminded that genius and insanity claim apartments in the same building. The writing is often genius, a genius that often chillingly depicts the near insanity of deep depression. Macdonald’s reading does reveal the achingly beautiful “inner voice” of this book. But that is the voice of a deeply shaken, fragile young woman. The work is not balm for those similarly disoriented. In terms of Distilled Harmony, this is a work of discord. Macdonald does eventually make her way to a kind of harmony, but the telling of her tale remains a dark tale of survival. Not a pean to victorious harmony. Were she my daughter, as she chronologically could be, and I had read this book, I would be terribly concerned. But then, were she my daughter, and were I still alive, there would have been no reason to write the book.
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