from Life on Earth

9

At first light, I am often woken up by the calls of sparrows. Over time I have realized that they always start to call twenty minutes before the sun comes up. The sun comes up late in the winter and so they start to call late too. The sun comes up early in the summer and so they start to call early too. Their call is different before and after sunrise. Before sunrise the cry they make sounds like “scree, scree, scree.” After sunrise this changes to “chup, chup, chup.” I don’t know what the connection is between the sun and the calls they make.

10

On a little path in the hills I saw an ant with a drag hold on a dead dung beetle. The beetle might have been stepped on by somebody, it was crushed out of shape and the fluids that had leaked from its body had stuck two little rocks to it, making it heavier for the ant. The ant had its mandibles clasped tightly on the beetle and it was wriggling back and forth as hard as it could, trying to drag the beetle. The beetle was rocking slightly but wasn’t moving forward at all. I watched for a long time, and up until I finally left, the admirable little soldier was still trying its hardest without rest. No other ant came to help it, and it seemed to have no inclination to go back to the colony for reinforcements.

12

Two sparrows landed on the railing of the porch outside my window. The spot is a little gulf of sunlight, warm, quiet, safe. They were two old sparrows, and only the earth can say how many baby sparrows they have raised. The two sparrows sat there in brilliant sunlight, looking well kept and well fed. Their eyes were squinting and their noggins turned this way and that, they seemed absolutely carefree. From time to time they called once or twice, the sound guileless and intimate. They were solid of build, their feathers fluffed out, heads scrunched down on their thick necks, like coach drivers in sheepskin coats for winter.

19

On January 1, 1988, I saw the sun rise. I made a note about this sunrise because I had never in my life seen anything like it. It was as if a miracle had taken place, it shocked me into silent amazement. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez describes the sunrise in Macondo the day after four straight years of rain has finally stopped: “the world lighted up with a crazy crimson sun as harsh as brick dust and almost as cool as water.” I don’t want to try to say a lot to describe the sunrise that I watched. The sun was red and very large, making me think first of a millstone in a village courtyard. If you’d seen this sunrise, you’d believe it.

24

We ordinarily think of north as up and south as down. As we travel north, with the sun at our backs, we say we are going up. As we travel south toward the sun, we say we are heading down. I don’t know where this up and down distinction comes from (the system of naming degrees of latitude? topography?). As we travel on the planet we have this sense of up and down in mind. Rather like we envision officials above and the people below.

25

Magpies and sparrows are the two resident or non-migratory birds one sees most often in the north. Their presence makes northern winters lively. There is a folk saying to the effect that “Sparrows fly with owls.” The literal meaning of this is that little birds tend to blindly fly after bigger birds. I have seen a sparrow flying after a magpie before and so was made aware of two different sorts of flight found among birds. Magpies are calm and composed in flight, their wings move like tree leaves rocking in the wind, and one gets the impression that...