Dizzied with medievalist imaginings, in love with a falconer three hundred years dead…
Van zinnen kun je gelukkig worden. Zinnen over een havik en meneer White, de schrijver van het beduimelde pocketje over Gos de havik op mijn rek met jeugdboeken. “But White was desirous of a rite of passage. A proper knight’s vigil. And he needed to do it alone, man against man, as it were. Watching his hawk would be a privation, an ordeal, a test of his Word. He would not be cruel. But he would conquer both the hawk and himself in one fell swoop. ‘Man against bird,’ he wrote, ‘with God as an umpire, they had sat each other out for three thousand years.’ In this long vigil – White had six hours’ sleep in six days – the effects of extreme tiredness took their toll. Again and again, delirious from lack of sleep, sitting in the kitchen or standing in the lamplit barn, he lifted the fat and frightened hawk onto his fist, reciting it passages from Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II, Othello, – ‘but the tragedy had to be kept out of the voice’ – and all the sonnets he could remember, whistling hymns to it, playing it Gilbert and Sullivan and Italian opera, and deciding, on reflection, that hawks like Shakespeare best.”
Een ridderwake. God als scheidsrechter. En al de sonnetten van Shakespeare beschikbaar in je hoofd, terwijl je een overvoede havik op je handschoen houdt. De wereld is intussen haast onbegrijpelijk veranderd. En toch leeft er nóg een vrouw die als meisje White las, en die tot overmaat van geluk echt een havik wilde trainen.

H. Macdonald, H is for Hawk, Londen, 2014.