That Thing with Feathers
When the world starts to look dark, it can help to pay close attention to the beauty around us.
Sometimes when we鈥檙e conceiving an issue of 探花精选 we know early on which story and even which image we expect to feature on the cover; other times it doesn鈥檛 come together until it鈥檚 nearly time to ship it to the printer. That was the case this time around, with a bunch of us gathered around a wall of mockups, trying to decide whether, for instance, an ethereal shot of a Northern Gannet misrepresented our story about volunteers who make an annual pilgrimage to an island off Wales to rescue the birds from often brutal entanglements with the cast-off plastic rubbish they鈥檝e used to fashion their nests. Or trying to figure out how we might visually convey the sudden and mysterious absence of bird life on Florida鈥檚 Seahorse Key. Or searching for a way to capture the urgency of the fight to save Ecuador鈥檚 Yasun铆 National Park, the most biodiverse patch of land on the planet, from devastating oil development without just bumming everyone out before they even got past the cover. As is often the case with the articles we publish in 探花精选, every one of these stories takes you to places that can be dark and distressing; and every one also, thankfully, carries elements of hope. How to deliver all of that in a single image?
An elegant solution emerged when someone suggested that we stop trying to be so literal. What if we were to publish,听instead, a photograph that鈥檚 extraordinarily beautiful and calming and that, while it doesn鈥檛 relate directly to any of the features in this issue, somehow meaningfully evokes them all? What if the cover image could be something as simple and singular as a feather? So that鈥檚 what we did. And I honestly cannot imagine, at this moment, a more powerful image for the 探花精选 cover than Robert Clark鈥檚 stunningly detailed shot of a Superb Lyrebird鈥檚 tail feather.
In whose first line I鈥檝e pilfered for the headline to this column, what Emily Dickinson celebrates, what to her embodies 鈥淗ope,鈥 is the constancy and tenacity, in the face of all manner of challenge and peril, that birds demonstrate to those who will notice and care. I鈥檓 writing this in a light-drenched apartment eight floors above west Harlem, and when I look out my windows toward the Hudson River I see gulls and flocks of sparrows soaring and scampering through the sky. They鈥檙e sublime, and they give me solace, and though they ask nothing in return they inspire me to keep working, to keep doing whatever I can do to help.