Zeng Xinyiwen.
Like the pink cover, "12 Birds, You: Nature's Happiness Classroom" is gentle, and it records a journey of self-redemption. The death of his mother has brought an unprecedented blow to the life of author Charlie Corbett. And the encounter with twelve birds with different temperaments finally brought him out of his anxiety and depression. Family stories, life insights, and bird science are intertwined into a warm picture with rich layers.
Charlie Corbett was born into a family of livestock farmers in the English countryside and spent a happy childhood on the farm. After graduating with a diploma in history from the University of Edinburgh, he worked as a financial journalist for more than 20 years, a job that took him around the world, Australia and Africa. As the years of uncertainty approached, especially after his mother fell ill, the author suddenly realized that he had completely disconnected from the farm and nature where he grew up, so he decided to return to his hometown and reconnect with nature. Through this book, the author hopes to remove the professional threshold of bird watching, so that birds can become accessible to nature and become a hobby closely related to our daily lives. In addition to the natural science aspect, the erudite author also quoted many poems and folk tales written about birds, enriching the literary heritage of bird-watching culture. Interestingly, there are surprising differences between Chinese and foreign cultures in terms of bird preferences. For example, there are many superstitions about magpies in Western culture, and magpies are considered ominous omens, without the festive meaning contained in their Chinese names. The English children's song "The Ballad of the Magpie" sings: "One for sorrow, two for joy;Three for girls and four for boys;Five for silver and six for gold;Seven represents a story that has not yet been told. So in Europe, when people see a magpie, they will rush to look for a second one in the sky, or take off their hats to salute the magpie and greet Mr. Magpie's wife, as the author's father did, so as to avoid bad luck.
In addition to adding a timeless literary touch to birdwatching culture, the book is also full of the author's own autobiographical personal memories. The author's dissection of his mother's journey of cancer and self-redemption until her death is both courageous and heartbreaking. As a translator, when I look back on the author's past, I feel that I have accompanied the author through the troughs of his life. When you are caught off guard and face this most secret and private emotion, it is easy to be dragged into the black hole of emotions and trapped in a person's small world and unable to extricate yourself, especially during the entire translation period of this book, I have been staying alone in the UK due to the epidemic, and the translation has also stalled due to low mood. However, the author gained the power to transcend grief from the birds, and with the author's words, I gradually felt the reconnection with the birds and nature, ushering in the dawn of life, and at this time, the translation was like an injection of clear spring, the words flowed, and I also found the right rhythm again.
Bird watching is a long-standing tradition in the UK and a national hobby. From the British royal family to the common people, loyal fans of birds abound. Prince Philip, the husband of former Queen Elizabeth II, is a well-known bird lover. In 1956, Prince Philip sailed across the South Pacific on the royal yacht Britannia, passing through Kenya, Sri Lanka and Malaysia to Australia to open the Melbourne Summer Olympics. The four-month voyage became the opportunity for the Prince to fall in love with birds. He held up his Hasselblad camera, which he had acquired that year, and captured the treasures of many British Islands birds**. In 1962, Prince Philip compiled these birdwatching findings into a book and published The Birds of Britannia. Until 2018, Prince Philip continued his hobby of bird watching. At the national level, there is a tradition called "biggarden birdwatching" in the UK, which calls for an hour of bird watching in their garden, a nearby park or woodland on one day at the end of January each year to record the species and number of birds they observe. It is also the world's largest nationwide bird census.
However, the author of "12 Birds, **You" is not satisfied with this. In his view, bird watching is not only a hobby, but also a way of life to live with nature. While integrating bird watching into daily life, the author is also advocating a harmonious coexistence with birds and nature. The bird is no longer just an object to be gazed at, but a natural creature that can interact with human beings and have a heart-to-heart connection. This philosophy has inspired many reflections on the relationship between man and bird, man and nature, and man and man. If you ask a question to a bird, it may not give you an answer and will just continue to do its own thing according to the laws of nature. It's a dehumanized mindset – each of us is a speck of dust in the universe, a passerby, and we can change the environment, but not the laws of nature. This coincides with the Taoist philosophy of "doing nothing and doing nothing", that is, not to be anxious before things happen, and to do things according to the laws of the development of things;Try not to change the laws of nature, but to do things according to the laws of nature.
The bird's inspiration to us is not only ideological, but also makes us reflect on the way of survival in modern society. For involution culture, there are things we can learn from birds. The owl needs to perch for twenty-two hours a day, which means that it spends most of the day resting. The owl can do this because it is a very efficient bird, nature's genius hunter, and can kill more than a thousand mice a year. In terms of intelligence, the owl is not as good as the crow bird, which can open the box with a tool, but it knows how to focus its energy on hunting and push its hunting skills to the extreme. This inspires us to accept that we are not omnipotent, and that we don't need to be able to do everything. We don't have time to find the answers to all our questions, focus on solving the matter at hand, have no distractions, and avoid meaningless involution and anxiety.
On the other hand, birds also inspire us how to relax. City walks are a very popular pastime among young people. But we feel that it is difficult to have the opportunity to get close to nature in urban life, but in fact, nature has always been there, it is like a faded wallpaper, a ** background, but we don't pay attention. I think the author proposes another possibility of city walking: take off your headphones, put down your phone, and maybe discover a different city when you allow yourself to be on the same frequency as nature and let the chirping and cheering of birds accompany you as you walk.
There is a saying that nature is our externalized body, so approaching nature is also to get familiar with our other body, listen to the voice of the body, and understand nature is also to understand and ** ourselves. Friends who are familiar with Taiwan's New Wave will remember that in Yang Dechang's film "**", the heroine once wrote the beginning of such a paragraph melancholy: "If you understand the seasons, change is just a repetition of reincarnation." This is the negative impact of the alienation and alienation between man and nature, and between man and man, under typical neoliberalism. Alienation shackles the heroine in the monotonous life of day after day. Maybe when she tries to heal herself in a way that goes into nature, the story will have a different ending.
Yes, spring, summer, autumn and winter, the change of seasons is repeated. But in this repetition, nature is not static, but constantly changing and renewing. As the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, one cannot step into the same river twice. Because people are no longer the same people, and the river is not what it once was. Birds bring us to this change and vitality of nature, liberate us from the confusion of the ego, and thus gain a more open-minded state of mind, allowing us to see the infinite in the finite and the eternal from the moment.