Yet our unsuccessful hunt for other life in the galaxy tells us that life itself is the aberration, a quirky miracle we’ve been allowed to participate in — which for some is proof enough of God and for others is what makes antidepressants superfluous. Still, death is our default mode, and the process of maturation means coming to accept our mortal nature with humility and wonder. And the salmon — in their one and their many — ask/s us if we get this.
SOURCES
Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. Trans. Philip Vellacott. New York: Penguin, 1961.
Aristophanes. The Birds. www.gutenberg.net.
Barbellion, W. N. P. The Journal of a Disappointed Man. 1919. Pocket Classics. London: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1984.
Bauby, Jean-Dominique. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. Trans. Richard Howard. Boston: David R. Godine, 1982.
Brodsky, Joseph. “An Immodest Proposal.” New Republic. November 11, 1991.
Burton, Robert. Anatomy of Melancholy.
Cederholm, Jeff, et al. Pacific Salmon and Wildlife: Special Edition Technical Report. Wildlife-Habitat Relationships in Oregon and Washington, 2000.
Chuang Tzu. The Way of Chuang Tzu. Trans. Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions, 1965.
Clark, Ella. Indian Legends of the Northwest. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953.
Collins, Billy. “Purity.” In Sailing Alone Around the Room. New York: Random House, 2001.
Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Western Bird Songs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.
Cruickshank, A. D., and H. G. Cruickshank. 1001 Questions Answered about Birds. New York: Dover, 1958.
Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999.
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960.
Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. London: Blackwell, 2003.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays: First and Second Series. Intro. Douglas Crase. New York: Library of America, 1990.
Glück, Louise. Proofs and Theories. New York: Ecco Press, 1994.
Griggs, Jack. All the Birds of North America. New York: HarperPerennial, 1997.
Heraclitus. Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus. Ed. Brooks Haxton. New York: Viking, 2001.
Holt, Jim. “The Human Factor: Should the Government Put a Price on Your Life?” New York Times, March 28, 2004.
House, Freeman. Totem Salmon. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.
Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Introduction to Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Modern Library/Random House, 1947.
Kael, Pauline. 5001 Nights at the Movies. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1982.
Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.
Keats, John. “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 4th ed. Ed. Mary Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and John Stallworthy. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
Kroodsma, Donald. The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
Lemmon, Robert. Our Amazing Birds: Little Known Facts about Their Private Lives. New York: Doubleday, 1951.
Martin, Laura. The Folklore of Birds. Old Saybrook, Conn.: Globe Pequot Press, 1993.
Mitchell, Stephen, trans. The Book of Job. New York: Harper-Perennial, 1979.
Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957.
Moore, Marianne. “An Octopus.” In Modern American Poets: Their Voices and Visions. Ed. Robert DiYanni. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.
Motion, Andrew. Keats. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998.
Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83.4 (1974): 435–50.
“Nutria in the Northwest.” www.cse.pdx.edu/wetlands/nwnutria.dir/nnwEI.htm.
Richardson, Scott. East Bay Bird Guide. Olympia, Wa.: Black Hills Audubon, 1997.
Rothenberg, David. Why Birds Sing. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Sewall, Richard. The Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Sexton, Anne. “Her Kind.” In The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
Sontag, Susan. “Regarding the Torture of Others.” New York Times, May 23, 2004.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. New York: New American Library, 1960.
Thurman, Robert. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. New York: Bantam Books, 1994.
Tuttle, Merlin. America’s Neighborhood Bats: Understanding and Learning to Live in Harmony with Them. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988.
Welty, Joel. The Life of Birds. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1975.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Universal Library. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, n.d.
Willis, Patricia. “On ‘An Octopus.’” www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/moore/octopus.htm.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “The Inner and the Outer.” In Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman. Trans. C. G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue. Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982–92.
Wolf, Jaime. “Canceled Flight” (on the development of the jetpack). New York Times, June 11, 2000.