That we will never know what it is like to be another — another person, another creature — is one of the most exasperating things in life, but also one of the most humbling, the most catalytic to our creative energies: the great calibrator of our certainties, the ultimate corrective for our self-righteousness, the reason we invented language and science and art. If there weren’t such an abyss between us and all that is not us, we never would have tried to bridge it with our microscopes and telescopes and equations seeking to know the vaster realities of nature beyond us; with our poems and our paintings and our songs seeking to be known, to convey to another what it is like to be alive in this particular arrangement of sinew and spirit.

Not long after the philosopher Thomas Nagel fathomed the abyss between one creaturely consciousness and another with his classic paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and long before science revealed the strangest aspect of what it is like to be an owl, the Japanese artist and storyteller Keizaburō Tejima beckoned the human imagination to enter the world of humanity’s most beloved bird with his 1982 book Owl Lake (public library).

As “the sky darkens from gold to blue and a gentle stillness settles upon the land,” we see the owls awake into the gloaming “hungry after a day of sleep” and set out to hunt.

We see the great wings sweep the sky, the great eyes mirror the moonlight, casting yellow shadows over the still black water.

All night the mother and father owls take turns hunting to feed their baby, bringing silver fish to the nest.

As dawn cracks the day open like a hatching egg, we see the owl family recede into the landscape, merge with mountain and lake, and we are returned to the wider world, reminded that every creature in all its dazzling complexity is ultimately part of a greater whole — a whole simpler than its parts.

Nestled deep in the mountain there lies a lake that shimmers in the morning starlight.

As the stars fade away, the sky brightens from black to blue and a gentle awakening settles upon the land.

It is then that the owls go to sleep.

Complement with the strange and wondrous science of how owls see with sound and Mary Oliver’s poetic meditation on the meaning of life lensed through an owl, then revisit Tejima’s bittersweet parable Swan Sky.