H is for Hawk - a memoir

The cure for loneliness is solitude   - Marianne Moore

I wanted to cut loose from the world ...a desire to rip away all human softness and leave stranded
in a world of savage ,courteous despair - pg 38

Goshawks are nervous because they live their lives ten times faster than we do - pg 56.

Everything about a hawk is tuned and trained to kill  - pg 83

To train a hawk, you must watch it like a hawk, so you come to understand its moods. Then you gain the ability to predict what it will do next ..eventually you don't see the hawk at all. YOu seem to feel what is feels , Notice what is notices . The hawks apprehension becomes your own - pg 86

She made herself disappear, and then in the birts she watched, took flight ...as the days passed in the dark room, my humanity was burning away. - pg 86.

There is a superstition among falconers than a hawks ability is inversely proportional to the ferocity of its name - pg 89.

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 - pg 124. 

Being an expert  opens you to judgement. Success is pressure . He quite cannot bear it. -pg 147.

'repetition compulsion'  - psychological term. .
  The need to reenact painful experiences in order to master them - pg 162.

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps  - pg 171.


"Love seeketh not Itself to please,
 Nor for itself hath any care;
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hells despair  "
    - Blake (also in pg 174)