Towards the end of a nearly perfect, windy winter day, as I ambled homewards through a quiet suburb, the sky suddenly seemed to sink down towards me. The light dimmed. I had no idea what was happening. I felt a curious suffocating sensation and gasped audibly. Was this how my world would end?
It took a second to realize that it was not that serious. Thousands of dark, shiny birds, starlings for sure, had flown in from somewhere and were flocking thickly, perhaps fifteen feet above my head. They felt far closer because their arrival was so sudden and quite unexpected. The previously bright sky was so obscured by the birds that it grew perceptibly darker. I was reminded of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the warring twins, and their meeting with Alice in Through the Looking Glass. The sky thickens as the “monstrous crow, black as a tar-barrel” flies down, and “frightened the two brothers so, they quite forgot their quarrel.” In less than a minute it was all over. The starlings flew away on the wind and did not come back. A man of the Middle Ages would no doubt have taken it for a sign from God. I did roughly the same, though I still have no idea what I was being told.
I had been walking out in some remote woods, listening to the soft thunder of the gale in the bare trees, one of the loveliest sounds on Earth. It had been an especially clean, clear day of pure, icy air, very high skies and distant views. By the time I had made my way back into the brickish inhabited fringes of the town, my mind had been turning to dull thoughts of groceries, news bulletins, timetables, and deadlines. It was because I was quite unready for the cloud of starlings that it affected me so strongly.
I had seen them before, in another place I associate with Lewis Carroll’s mysterious Alice, who haunts my part of the world like a living child. I would not be surprised to see her, hurrying away from me, round a corner, at any time, or perhaps drifting past me on the river, in a boat. That other place was Otmoor, the desolate, melancholy plain to the northeast of Oxford, once so neatly cut into squares by hedges and ditches that it is supposed to have been the model for the giant chessboard in Through the Looking Glass. Late on another winter’s afternoon, at the suggestion of a friend, I had set off on to the edges of the moor in the hope of seeing what is nowadays called (rather pretentiously, in my view) a “murmuration” of starlings. At certain times of the year, these events are common there, though you can never be certain of seeing one. Starlings have recently become popular birds in England. When I was a child, these flashy, glossy, bright-eyed birds were mistakenly dismissed as vermin. Now they are an object of fascination, as they form into giant, shaped clouds and fly in unison, in tens of thousands.
The time I saw them do this was a still, freezing late afternoon in November—not a windy one, the sort of day when even puddles do not shiver in the wind, and the darkness slowly gathers on the land while the sky remains bright. Nobody was sure the birds would come, and to begin with there were so few of them that I thought I would be disappointed. I wrote about it at the time, when my memory was fresh.
At about four o’clock, when there was still plenty of light in the sky, I began to notice small flocks of starlings flying in, quite low, from far away, from all directions. But just when I was thinking this would take hours to reach its full strength, I saw a huge squadron of (I would guess) 2,000 of the tiny birds, swooping in across the marshes, darkening the sky where they were, low but in an undulating formation, one minute shaped like a boat, the next like a Zeppelin, the next curving up and down like a roller-coaster or a line of hills, then flattening out, climbing, dipping, climbing again and hurtling off to another corner of the marsh, there to combine into ever-larger groups of countless thousands, and resume the exuberant making of mysterious, ever-changing shapes in the winter air. For it was exuberant. It may well be that we often wrongly attribute human emotions to other creatures, but I am quite sure they were enjoying themselves.
They were in constant motion, yet seeming to think as one, making sudden turns in almost total unison. Seen from directly underneath they were all individuals, flying or gliding at their own will. But seen from the side, and from far away, they had an ordered, unified purpose. Even in the increasingly biting cold (I had not dressed warmly enough) I was unable to stop watching until the light had gone.
Recalling that afternoon now, I realize that, because I was prepared for and expecting some such sight, I was not as astonished and disturbed as I would be when I met the same thing suddenly, some years later. Which perhaps suggests that, however much you think you expect and even understand the great and powerful experiences of life, they can still overpower you when they happen. My first proper sight of the Himalayas, seen from an aircraft flying a few miles to the south of the range, has always lingered as a sort of warning that we have no idea of the length, depth, breadth and height of the power which made the universe. My first view of the Grand Canyon at dusk, likewise, filled me with a feeling that some message, part encouragement, part warning, was written in the shapes of the enormous rocks. I still laugh at the official theory that the whole thing is the tedious outcome of “erosion.” You really think so? Why would you choose that, of all possible explanations?
In the case of the starlings, I have no idea what their vast, swooping massing and gathering means, though I am sure it means something. As when Philip Larkin says that “The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said” I respond by thinking: “Why almost, Mr. Larkin? Something is obviously being said. But I just do not know what it is, exactly.” There is no convincing theory of why the birds behave like this, or of how they all swim through the firmament in disciplined unison—yet also so freely and fluidly. I am sure they do it for their own pleasure, and perhaps also for the pleasure of someone else. But the theories that they do it for protection against predators do not stand up. The day I watched, a greedy hawk casually seized a starling from amid its fellows and made off with it for supper, without meeting any opposition. The truth is, this is one of the many things which we know nothing about, and cannot explain in tedious reductionist ways to ourselves. I am glad of this. I prefer life when some nearby things are unexplained, as so many far-off things already are.
I do not want to be given tedious theories about erosion to explain the shapes of the rocky headlands in the Grand Canyon. I would much rather think that they contain some message to us in an alphabet we currently cannot or will not read. The same goes for the cave paintings in Lascaux in France, perhaps twenty thousand years old. You cannot now see the originals of these, because human breath endangers their brilliance. But there are superb reproductions in nearby caves, and I will always be grateful to the guide who admitted that we actually know nothing about the people who painted them, or the purpose of their art. Oh good, I thought. I don’t want my mysteries picked to pieces. After all, twenty thousand years ago is simultaneously not all that long ago, in the measure of the ages, and impossibly far off, in normal time. The freshness, vividness, and sheer bursting life of the paintings has a similar message. As we are now, so once were they. As they are now, so shall we be. We are the same. We are also utterly, impossibly different. And on top of that, there is the forceful lesson that we know almost nothing about the universe we inhabit, or about how we come to be as we are. I am fairly sure that our current enthusiasm for banal explanations of everything comes from fear of the alternative, thrilling explanations , which are also—of course—as terrifying as a painting of the Last Judgement.
