ग.
यह कैसे पता चलता है कि लेखक की पत्नी पक्षियों से प्रेम करती थी?
Answers
My husband and I spend much of our free time in remote places, walking the trails and fields and dirt roads looking for birds. We seldom meet anyone in the wildlife refuges and bogs we regularly visit in northern Vermont, up on the Canadian border. Over time, walking in these landscapes empty of humans has a cumulative effect. I slip into the world of the birds; I listen for distant calls and songs; I study the leaves for the slightest sign of movement. My husband and I are one in the silence, searching without speaking. Not only is my speaking voice stilled, the voices in my mind are stilled, given over to something purer and richer—the air on my skin, sunlight and bird song, the brilliant colors of a blackburnian warbler.
For many years, birds were a reminder of the outdoors glimpsed through the window while I sat at my desk writing. Chickadees came to the feeder in the maple tree in the yard. Occasionally a hawk perched on an upper branch, and I consulted the bird guide to try to determine which species it was. I had an interest in birds just as I had an interest in gospel music and Vietnam War novels.
My casual notice of birds began to shift on a trip to Florida, when my husband and I encountered a stranger on a boardwalk at an Audubon sanctuary. The woman, who was staring intently into a patch of reeds, dipped her head and whispered, “American bittern.” I followed her gaze and saw nothing. She smiled at us and moved on, leaving us to peer into the foliage for a good five minutes before we could make out the bird standing just a few feet from us. With its pale coloring and striped breast, long neck and thin beak pointing skyward, the bittern was perfectly camouflaged, a reed among the reeds.
My delight, and chagrin, came not just from the fact that I had never seen a bittern before. I hadn’t even heard of this bird. Though I occasionally flipped through the bird guide, I ignored most of it, with no curiosity about the pages full of species I had not encountered. The bittern, and the many birds that followed, were like messengers telling me to wake up. How had I reached my forties without knowing these extraordinary creatures? How could I have been so blind, so self-absorbed, so just plain witless?
VIDEO FROM LIT HUB:
Personal Space With Sari Botton: Maggie Smith

00:00
Loading Ad
Being a writer means living in an inquisitive state. I am constantly turning over my own experience, looking for the stories beneath the surface and questioning my hidden motives and the motives of others. Writing demands a strange double vision, with a gaze focused simultaneously outward and inward. In order to write works of substance that speak to our times, we must be connected to human society and culture, but the act of writing requires separating from the din of people and news and striving. In the years I have spent writing three novels and a memoir, I have shut out a great deal. I have stayed sequestered in my house for days on end and maintained an almost maniacal focus on myself.
lekhak ki patni pakshiyon se pyar karti thi is baat ka pata uske chidiya ko roj dhaane dalne se tatha sharko ke prati gussa aur chidiya ko sharko ke hamle se bachane ke madhyam se pata chalta hai