In the middle of my bleakest winter, my friend Andrea gave me a battered copy of a forgotten book from her elderly father’s used bookshop in rural Texas, by a man named Hockley Clarke. I inhaled it in a day.

Born in England in the final year of the nineteenth century, Hockley Clarke grew up loving nature. When he was sent to France with the British infantry during WWI, still a teenager, he looked for birds whenever he was out of the trenches or had a day’s rest, listening for them through the blaze of the machine guns, once hearing the song of the nightingale clear and bright over a heap of dead bodies. “Although I am not a religious man,” he would later write, “I have always regarded birds and all wild life as the manifestations of God.”

Having narrowly survived, he founded a birding magazine he went on to edit single-handedly for forty years, writing numerous books about birds along the way. He continued birding into his nineties.

In the savage winter of 1962 — the coldest weather to strike Europe in eighty years (which didn’t stop Dervla Murphy from mounting her bicycle in Ireland headed for India) — a blackbird began roosting in Clarke’s elderberry tree. He named him Blackie and began bringing him food first thing every morning and again in the evening as the snow and ice lasted for weeks and weeks.

He didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of a long and tender relationship between Clarke’s family and Blackie’s.

Soon, Blackie was flying out of the tree at meal time, greeting Clarke with “a few glad chuckles.” Something began growing between man and bird, some unbroken thread of trust and tenderness.

Clarke writes:

Blackie and I had an understanding on those cold mornings. I spoke to him; he knew my voice and I am sure that he answered in his own language, of which I thought I had some understanding. There was perfect trust between us, a source of joy to me, and it must have been a comfort to him. Perhaps birds understand more than we think.

Clarke’s book was a lifeline from a friend when I most needed it. The moment I turned the last yellowed page, I rued that something so wonderful could have fallen out of print.

Because the most valiant way to complain is to create, and because Marginalian Editions was born precisely as such a constructive complaint against the tyranny of the marketable over the meaningful in modern publishing, Blackie & Co.: Blackbirds in My Garden is now back in a print, gilded and gladdening, each page a radiance of curiosity and kindness, the whole of it a bright assurance of the tenacity of life, a reminder that no matter the conditions of living, it is the unconditional that saves us.

Friendship is a lifeline twined of trust and tenderness. That we extend it to each other is benediction enough. To extend it across the barrier of biology and sentience, to another creature endowed with a wholly other consciousness, partakes of the miraculous.