8
PARTISAN REVIEW
Wronke, May 2, 1917
... Do you remember how one morning last April, at ten o'clock,
I called you both on the telephone and asked you to come with me to
the Botanical Gardens and hear the nightingale, that was giving a
concert there? We crouched on rocks in a dense thicket, near a ravine
where water was trickling slowly; after the nightingale's song we heard
a monotonous and plaintive cry, that might be given something like
this "Glee-glee-glee-gleec." I claimed
it
was some kind of marsh bird,
and Karl thought I was right, but we couldn't find out what it was.
Well! suddenly -near here, a few days ago, I heard that same plain–
tive cry, early in the morning, so that my heart began to throb with
impatience at the idea of knowing at last who it was that cried so.
I couldn't rest until today, when I finally found it: it is not a marsh
bird, it is the "wry-neck," a
~dnd
of magpie.
It
is hardly bigger than
a sparrow, and the reason for its name is that when
it
is in danger. it
tries to appall its enemies with funny gestures and contortions of the.
head. It lives on nothing but ants, which it gathers on its sticky tongue
like the ant-eating bear, and this is why the Spaniards call it "hormi–
guero"-the ant-eating bird. Moerike even wrote a nice little humor–
ous poem on it, that Hugo Wolf set to music. I
fee~
as if I had been
given a present, now that I've found who the bird is with the plaintive
voice. You might write Karl about it, it would please him.
What am I reading? Mostly books on natural sciences: geogra–
phy, botany and zoology. Yesterday I read a book on the cause of
the disappearance of song birds in Germany. The cultivation of for–
ests, gardens, and land, becoming more and more widespread and
systematic, takes
a~ay
all their natural means of making their nests
and looking for their food. Cultivation actually does do away little
by little with hollow trees, fallow lands, brushwood, and withered
leaves that have fallen on the ground. I felt quite gloomy reading
about it. Not that I am worried about the singing of birds because of
the pleasure it gives me, but it is the very idea of a silent and inevitable
disappearance of those little defenseless beings that distresses me so
that tears come to my eyes. It reminds me of a Russian book by Pro–
fessor Siebert on the disappearance of the Red-Skins in North Amer–
ica, that I read when I was still in Zprich. The Red-Skins, just like
the birds, are driven little by little from their domain by civilized man,
and doomed to a cruel and silent death.
But perhaps it is a disease in me, to have such ardent emotions
about everything. I feel sometimes as if I were not a real human being
at all, but a bird, some kind of animal that has taken on a human
face. Inside, I feel much more at home in a little scrap of garden, like
here, or in a field, stretched out on the grass and surrounded by bum-
