We are the only animal captive in a cage of its own making. Its bars can look like many things — the screen, the self, the scintillation of being right — but it is from within it that we look out and call our little view the world, forgetting that to recover our wildness is to recover our humanity, to waste it is to waste our aliveness.

Few have offered a more powerful key to the cage than William Henry Hudson (August 4, 1841–August 18, 1922) — the Audubon of the pampas, who discovered his gift for channeling the beating heart of nature amid the ruin of his best laid plans and went on to influence generations of writers, from Henry James and Ernest Hemingway to Barry Lopez and Robert Macfarlane.

All visionaries, even the farthest seers, are still a product of their time and place. In an era when hunting was the most popular sport and science studied living species as dead specimens, Hudson recounts how he first approached nature as “a sportsman and collector, always killing things.” But he was haunted by the uneasy sense that he was paying a high price for this violent negation of his kinship with other creatures, relinquishing some essential part of his own creatureliness.

Eventually, he traded the gun for the binoculars and the field notebook, determined to understand living beings on their own terms, collecting not bodies but observations, hunting not for game but for the play of ideas in a mind restless to apprehend the world.

Although he called himself a field-naturalist, Hudson wrote about what he observed with a scientist’s thirst for truth, a philosopher’s hunger for meaning, and a poet’s tenderness for the complicated miracle of being alive. In his moving 1919 memoir The Book of a Naturalist (public domain), he looks back on what he gained by giving up his era’s givens:

Abstention from killing had made me a better observer and a happier being, on account of the new or different feeling towards animal life which it had engendered. And what was this new feeling — wherein did it differ from the old of my shooting and collecting days, seeing that since childhood I had always had the same intense interest in all wild life? The power, beauty, and grace of the wild creature, its perfect harmony in nature, the exquisite correspondence between organism, form and faculties, and the environment, with the plasticity and intelligence for the readjustment of the vital machinery, daily, hourly, momentarily, to meet all changes in the conditions, all contingencies; and thus, amidst perpetual mutations and conflict with hostile and destructive forces, to perpetuate a form, a type, a species for thousands and millions of years!

These echoes of Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” are echoes of Hudson’s childhood — he had devoured On the Origin of Species as a boy in the wake of his mother’s death and had been deeply moved by its revelation of life as a ceaseless conversation between organisms and their environment, of the human animal as part of a vast and complex system, a part neither central and nor inevitable. Like most adults, he had unlearned the elemental truths we touch for a moment as children before culture and civilization slap our hand. Unlike most adults, he devoted his life to remembering what he had been bamboozled into forgetting — the wild wonder of life, the lavish otherness of its “endless forms,” so unbidden in their variousness: The world didn’t have to be beautiful, didn’t owe us three hundred species of hummingbirds, the needless blue extravagance of the bowerbird, the Fibonacci perfection of the argonaut.

Reflecting on this awakening to the wonder of wildness and how it consecrates the world, Hudson writes:

The main thing was the wonderfulness and eternal mystery of life itself; this formative, informing energy — this flame that burns in and shines through the case, the habit, which in lighting another dies, and albeit dying yet endures for ever; and the sense, too, that this flame of life was one, and of my kinship with it in all its appearances, in all organic shapes, however different from the human. Nay, the very fact that the forms were unhuman but served to heighten the interest; — the roe-deer, the leopard and wild horse, the swallow cleaving the air, the butterfly toying with a flower, and the dragon-fly dreaming on the river; the monster whale, the silver flying-fish, and the nautilus with rose and purple tinted sails spread to the wind.

Couple with Seamus Heaney’s magnificent poem “Death of a Naturalist,” then revisit Hudson on how to be a happier creature and Darwin on the spirituality of nature.