From a Hawk to a Mouse
May. 21st, 2010 07:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caper_estOne of the bits I like most about writing is its power to suddenly re-enchant my own world, when I find myself thinking the thoughts of a character wholly unlike me, and seeing a vision I'd never have seen otherwise.
Is there any spirit so really earthbound that it has never soared in its fancy on the high winds, and seen the wide world laid out beneath it with the fierce keen eyes of a hawk? Certainly, fantasy writers from Le Guin to Lackey and beyond have loved to tell of it, and bring it to life in their waking worlds.
I am no predator, for all that. But my current protagonist has the predator's mind par excellence: she is a fierce falcon of her world, an aristocrat who believes implicitly in the aristocratic spirit. She is also, at the moment, a falcon who is trying very hard to be a good mouse - albeit, if humans were mice, Kate might be a sort of corrupt Reepicheep fumbling towards the dawn. So it was only by her courtesy that I could glimpse this, this morning:
- That we envy the hawk's eyesight, from its eminence, with the world spread wide beneath it, and all the creatures thereof in its sight and danger. But the mouse's world is just as gigantic as the hawk's, and it sees much that the hawk never will: as the green translucent spears of the grass all about it, and the shadow of terror and mystery that blots out the Sun. And Kate felt all the thrill and hazard of that this morning - and I through her, and I don't ever think it would have crowded in on me otherwise.
It is a wonderful thing to sit at my beige coffee-stained keyboard, and share the mind of somebody so dreadfully alive.
630 words, and flowing.
Is there any spirit so really earthbound that it has never soared in its fancy on the high winds, and seen the wide world laid out beneath it with the fierce keen eyes of a hawk? Certainly, fantasy writers from Le Guin to Lackey and beyond have loved to tell of it, and bring it to life in their waking worlds.
I am no predator, for all that. But my current protagonist has the predator's mind par excellence: she is a fierce falcon of her world, an aristocrat who believes implicitly in the aristocratic spirit. She is also, at the moment, a falcon who is trying very hard to be a good mouse - albeit, if humans were mice, Kate might be a sort of corrupt Reepicheep fumbling towards the dawn. So it was only by her courtesy that I could glimpse this, this morning:
- That we envy the hawk's eyesight, from its eminence, with the world spread wide beneath it, and all the creatures thereof in its sight and danger. But the mouse's world is just as gigantic as the hawk's, and it sees much that the hawk never will: as the green translucent spears of the grass all about it, and the shadow of terror and mystery that blots out the Sun. And Kate felt all the thrill and hazard of that this morning - and I through her, and I don't ever think it would have crowded in on me otherwise.
It is a wonderful thing to sit at my beige coffee-stained keyboard, and share the mind of somebody so dreadfully alive.
630 words, and flowing.
