“The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” wrote Milton in Paradise Lost. Because the mind (which may in the end be a full-body phenomenon) is the cup that lifts the world to our lips to be tasted — a taste we call reality — it is difficult to examine the cup itself, to observe the inner workings of the mind as it sips questions and turns them over with the tongue of thought to form ideas, to render a world. We can’t will it, because the will is a handmaiden of the mind; we can only surrender to it, and never willingly, when something unexpected — a grave illness, a great loss, a great love — vanquishes the tranquilizing effect of habit, jolts us awake from the trance of near-living, and makes us see reality afresh, purified and magnified.

No one, to my mind, has articulated those vivifying interruptions more powerfully — or more delightfully — than William Henry Hudson (August 4, 1841–August 18, 1922).

Born in Argentina as Guillermo Enrique Hudson, he lost his mother when he was only a teenager. Darwin had just published On the Origin of Species. The disconsolate boy devoured it immediately — it must have been a salve, this beautiful and brutal model of nature in which the survival of the species is perfected by the deaths of individuals. Like the young John James Audubon, who turned to birds in the wake of losing his own mother, Hudson — who would eventually become the Audubon of the pampas — grew passionately interested in ornithology. He resented the way science was done, killing living birds to make “skins” for study; he resented the way civilization was done, destroying wildlife habitats for human needs. He felt the urgency and ecstasy of a calling — to enchant the world with the wondrous birds of Patagonia he had spent his youth observing, taking meticulous notes about their morphology, habits, and migration patterns, thinking constantly about what it is like to be a creature so profoundly other.

In his early thirties, Hudson sailed for England, eager to share what he knew of a feathered universe entirely alien to the European mind.

He reached out to John Gould — the Old World’s preeminent ornithologist, a disaffected taxidermist who had risen to fame largely thanks to his wife’s extraordinary ornithological art — and received a curt rejection.

Unable to find work, he folded his gaunt six-foot frame into a giant origami bird to sleep on the benches of Hyde Park.

It took him two years to get a paying job as a writer — for a women’s magazine, under the pseudonym Maud Merryweather. He wrote the way he felt the living world — passionately, rigorously, his tender curiosity shimmering with awe.

Doors began to crack open and he was soon writing for other small journals. For fifteen years, he trojan-horsed birds into popular interest stories, until he finally published his first book of ornithology, about the birds of Argentina. He was forty-seven.

Then the floodgates opened and out came pouring some of the most breathtaking nature writing our civilization has produced. Hemingway cited Hudson in his novels. Joseph Conrad marveled that his prose was “like the grass that the good God made to grow and when it was there you could not tell how it came.” By the end of Hudson’s life, his collected works — dozens of ornithological books and natural history essays, novels and travelogues, written with a philosopher’s quickening of mind and poet’s sensitivity to the light of the world — amounted to twenty-four volumes.

Shortly after his death, he was honored with a bird sanctuary memorial in his name in Hyde Park, not far from the bench that had held his dreams as a homeless young writer.

What shaped Hudson’s gift for channeling the beating heart of nature, for rendering the living world in such exultant and exacting detail, was the ruin of his best laid plans — an accident that befell him in Patagonia just before he left Argentina for good. Pulsating through it is the reminder that every loss of control is an invitation to surrender, and it is only in surrender that we break out of our stories to contact a deeper truth — about ourselves, about the world, about the interchange between the two that we call reality.

Not long after turning thirty, determined to make a name for himself as an ornithologist, Hudson set out on a yearlong observing expedition from the pampas to Tierra del Fuego, across the austere scrub and cold canyons of the Patagonian desert. Recounting the experience a lifetime later in his altogether magnificent 1893 book Idle Days in Patagonia (public domain), he reflects on the spirit in which he entered upon the adventure:

To my mind there is nothing in life so delightful as that feeling of relief, of escape, and absolute freedom which one experiences in a vast solitude, where man has perhaps never been, and has, at any rate, left no trace of his existence.

But things did not go as planned from the outset. The southbound steamer he boarded in Buenos Aires ran aground in the middle of the second night. Hudson awoke to find himself beached on the Patagonian coast. Too restless to wait for rescue, he decided to trek inland in search of human habitation, which the octogenarian captain had assured him was near.

After two days of walking, without provisions or a map, he came upon a gasp of a vista — the Rio Negro river snaking across the desert, “broader than the Thames at Westminster, and extending away on either hand until it melted and was lost in the blue horizon, its low shores clothed in all the glory of groves and fruit orchards and vineyards and fields of ripening maize.”

He eventually made it to a farmhouse laden with fruit that “glowed like burning coals in the deep green foliage.” After replenishing his energies, he set out on the first leg of the expedition proper — an eighty-mile ride along the river — accompanied by a young Englishman.

They stopped midway at a “rude little cabin,” in “a dreary and desolate spot, with a few old gaunt and half-dead red willows for only trees.” One hot afternoon, bored and birdless, Hudson picked up his companion’s revolver to examine it. It went off immediately, sending a bullet through his left knee. Blood came streaming, more blood than he had ever seen.

The young man, afraid that Hudson would die without medical care, decided to ride out in search of rescue. He left Hudson a jug of water, locked him in the windowless cabin “to prevent the intrusion of unwelcome prowlers,” and promised to return before nightfall. He didn’t. When darkness came, it was total — Hudson had no candle. Shivering with pain under his blood-soaked poncho, finding that he could “neither doze nor think,” all he could do was listen. And yet he did think, a lovely thought about the importance of hearing to unsighted people and animals dwelling in the dark — one of those sudden flashes of empathy for otherness that our own suffering can spark.

Suddenly he registered a strange sound, as if someone were dragging a rope across the clay floor. He lit one of his few matches and looked around, but saw nothing, and so he passed the “black anxious hours” with his mind’s ear pressed to the world outside the cabin, until he could hear the emissaries of dawn — the scissor-tail tyrant birds twittering in the willow, the red-billed finches singing in the reeds, a song that sounded like crying.

But none was more assuring, more life-affirming than “the dreamy, softly rising and falling, throaty warblings of the white-rumped swallow”:

A loved and beautiful bird is this, that utters his early song circling round and round in the dusky air, when the stars begin to pale; and his song, perhaps, seems sweeter than all others, because it corresponds in time to that rise in the temperature and swifter flow of the blood — the inward resurrection experienced on each morning of our individual life.

As day at last began to break, an enormous venomous snake slithered out from under his poncho — it had slept beside him all night.

The young Englishman returned in the morning with an oxcart that took Hudson, over two delirious days along a hot dusty road, to the headquarters of the South American Missionary Society. There he remained bedridden for months, his dreams crushed, his expedition foreclosed before it had begun. With no birds to observe, Hudson began examining the very instrument of observation.

A generation before Virginia Woolf wrote so movingly about illness as a portal to self-understanding, Hudson found in his incapacitation, in the devastation of his plans, what we always find when we are forced to halt our ordinary methods of avoiding ourselves — an unbidden opening into the nature of the mind, into that glowing space between the mechanics of cognition and the mystery of consciousness, articulated in the language of his heart: birds.

He writes:

Lying helpless on my back through the long sultry mid-summer days, with the white-washed walls of my room for landscape and horizon, and a score or two of buzzing house-flies, perpetually engaged in their intricate airy dance, for only company, I was forced to think on a great variety of subjects, and to occupy my mind with other problems than that of migration. These other problems, too, were in many ways like the flies that shared my apartment, and yet always remained strangers to me, as I to them, since between their minds and mine a great gulf was fixed. Small unpainful riddles of the earth; flitting, sylph-like things, that began life as abstractions, and developed, like imago from maggot, into entities: I always flitted among them, as they performed their mazy dance, whirling in circles, falling and rising, poised motionless, then suddenly cannoning against me for an instant, mocking my power to grasp them, and darting off again at a tangent. Baffled I would drop out of the game, like a tired fly that goes back to his perch, but like the resting, restive fly I would soon turn towards them again; perhaps to see them all wheeling in a closer order, describing new fantastic figures, with swifter motions, their forms turned to thin black lines, crossing and recrossing in every direction, as if they had all combined to write a series of strange characters in the air, all forming a strange sentence — the secret of secrets! Happily for the progress of knowledge only a very few of these fascinating elusive insects of the brain can appear before us at the same time: as a rule we fix our attention on a single individual, like a falcon amid a flight of pigeons or a countless army of small field finches; of a dragon-fly in the thick of a cloud of mosquitoes, or infinitesimal sand-flies. Hawk and dragon-fly would starve if they tried to capture, or even regarded, more than one at a time.

Hudson sometimes hobbled out of his room with a stick to talk to people, but although he listened earnestly “to the story of their small un-avian affairs,” he had never found it easy to connect with humans:

I could always quit them without regret to lie on the green sward, to gaze up into the trees or the blue sky, and speculate on all imaginable things.

With the distance of a lifetime, he would look back on the experience as a microcosm of life itself, in which it never the execution of our plans but their interruption, those rude demolitions of the maquette we mistake for reality, that leaves us most profoundly transformed, deepened, magnified:

Our waking life is sometimes like a dream, which proceeds logically enough until the stimulus of some new sensation, from without or within, throws it into temporary confusion, or suspends its action; after which it goes on again, but with fresh characters, passions, and motives, and a changed argument.