Tom's Home Page | Birds of a Feather Halle, Louis J. Only the vultures, who love death and the sun, grew more numerous as the other birds disappeared. They came swinging and swaying on motionless wings, their shadows running over the trees and temples without a whisper,
Louis J. Halle was born in New York City and educated at Harvard University (1941 to 1954). He served in the U. S. Department of State and was a member of the policy planning staff. His academic career included the University of Virginia and the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. His other books include Transcaribbean, Birds Against Men, River of Ruins, and others.
like fish shadows over the ocean floor. Birds Against Men, 1938.
For a few ticks of the clock I am here, uncomprehending, attempting to make some record or memorial of this eternal passage, like a traveler in a strange country through which he is being hurried on a schedule not of his making and for a purpose he does not understand. Spring in Washington, 1963.
In my view the flash of lightning creates a whole landscape and abolishes it instantaneously, while to some other creature it may dawn and fade like the day itself, and the length of the day exceed a lifetime. Ibid.
I have looked through the Washington newspapers in season without finding any account of the arrival of ducks or the visitations of gulls, although they reported the visit of a French functionary and the return from her wintering grounds in the south of somebody's wife. It was all news of the hive, with not a word of events in the outside world. Ibid.
Obsessed with fear at our dependence on one another, we are even more fearful of being dependent once more on ourselves. It is the nature of slavery to render its victims so abject that at last, fearing to be free, they multiply their own chains. You can liberate a freeman, but you canno liberate a slave. Ibid.
Let your boots fill with water at the start; it makes you free to go where you please. Ibid.
I never heard a wood thrush until I was a grown man, though I must have been surrounded by them every spring. Each year I discover new sights and sounds to teach me how blind and deaf I must still be. Ibid.
When I say that I have been acquainted with a warbler for ten years, it may be that the sum of that acquaintance is only a few minutes. Ibid.
The appearance of a familiar bird immediately awakens a train of forgotten associations, and this makes each spring transcend its predecessor. Ibid.
The flowering of the Japanese cherry trees is not so wonderful as the wave of warblers that passes through the countryside in mid-May, remaining sometimes only a day. Ibid.
When I see men able to pass by such a shining and miraculous thing as this Cape May warbler, the very distillate of life, and then marvel at the internal-combustion engine, I think we had better make ourselves ready for another Flood. Ibid.
Somewhere in the mists of time the eagle and the warbler had a common ancestor. Now the warbler sings in the pine woods, the eagle soars above the marshes, the ducks swim in the bay, gulls wheel. Ibid.
How extraordinary if this were altogether uninspired! We live ourselves in the mists of time, and cannot cast our vision beyond it. The world of our senses is purely spectacular. Ibid.
Every season is exceptional and this spring was no exception. Ibid.
No one can properly appreciate sunlight, I think, who does not go out before dawn. Ibid.
If you observe the progressof the seasons carefully, you will find them all present the year around. They are interwoven themes in this continuing symphonic utterance, each becoming dominant in its turn without ever wholly vanquishing the rest. Ibid.
Men do not commonly see what is before their eyes or hear what rings in their ears unless it is pointed out to them in a tone of accepted authority and given public importance. Ibid.
The universe is obviously square to the man who has never ventured out of the square chamber in which he was born. Ibid.
. . . knowledge of spring gives me the freedom of the world. Ibid.
We do not know more today than the child or the philosopher; we have simply limited the area of our concern, and so we know less. This suffices to explain our cultural and moral decline. Yet eternal nature remains all about us for our appreciation, when the time comes, and our redemption. Ibid.
If you want to know about Politics . . .just observe a flock of crows. Ibid.
All life, I suspect, is one. Ibid.