Ducks and Disenchantment

Ramblings of a literary and an ambulatory sort

He feels from Juda’s land

    The dreaded Infant’s hand;

  The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;

    Nor all the gods beside

    Longer dare abide…

John Milton, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”

Dear Friends,

Finally— finally! The spell of early, wet and dreadful spring that has hung on for since the sopping days of March, seems finally to have broken, and in its place a tangled, lush, and golden enchantment has taken its place. It’s lovely, verdant, excessive. My allergies are terrible. Look at this tree in all its blooming glory:

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been in Scotland and England and have been struck, by the proliferation of ducklings. Having lived near the “burn” (a Scottish word for a stream or body of water), my experience of ducklings has been one of being both charmed and harshly disillusioned. The reason that mama ducks have such big crews of ducklings is because not many of them survive. I have, personally, witnessed a blue heron snatch a duckling, throw it into the air, and swallow it whole. The experience brought to mind Tennyson’s line in In Memoriam:

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law–
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed –

The grey heron did not shriek (the seagulls do their fair share of that) but it certainly proclaimed that nature remains red in tooth and claw— and I will never be the same for witnessing it. Anyway, this year has been markedly more positive as it seems that larger schools of the ducklings have survived. Take, for instance, this little clutch of ducklings from earlier in April (I think I counted nine).

And here they are about a month later as adolescents— eight of them!

The timing of spring springing is fortunate. As the magic of late spring/early summer has been casting its glow over the landscape, I have been writing about enchantment and disenchantment. I’m reading/writing about his for two reasons. Firstly, I am working on a series of three academic articles on enchantment/disenchantment in contemporary literature for my post-doc. And out of this research, I’m teaching a class at Regent College this summer called “After Disenchantment.” I’ve been neck deep in these things, so that reading about (dis)enchantment has been illustrated for me: the way a whole environment can get shot through with beauty and gold, or submerged under grey.

Enchantment, Dis-Enchantment, Re-Enchantment:

New science gave a clear theoretical form to the idea of an immanent order which could be understood on its own, without reference to interventions from outside (even if we might reason from it to a Creator, and even a benevolent Creator), the life of the buffered individual, instrumentally effective in secular time, created the practical context within which the self-sufficiency of this immanent realm could become a matter of experience.

• Charles Taylor, A Secular Age