just finished: Being a Beast by Charles Foster
books bought
- Fraud by Anita Brookner
- Letters from London by Julian Barnes
books borrowed & received
- Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide by Charles Foster
- The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark
- True Failure by Alex Higley (out 2/25/25)
- Q: A Voyage around the Queen by Craig Brown (out 10/1/24)
books finished
- Lise Lillywhite by Margery Sharp
- Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner
- Talking it Over by Julian Barnes
- Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide by Charles Foster
Hey you,
A confession: I’ve been watching video essays, mostly on Youtube, chasing the high of the hbomberguy video on plagiarism from months ago. But they’ve largely been boring; even when they are well-researched, visually appealing, they say nothing unexpected: here’s why fast fashion is bad, here’s why clean beauty is a lie, I fact-checked some crazy conservative weirdo and you’re not going to believe it but they’re lying to you. Oh, there are exceptions—A History of the World According to Getty Images is one that’s really worth watching (though I’ll note it’s not on Youtube). But mostly, whether I agree with the conclusions or not, they rarely feel novel; indeed, they hardly feel short of obvious. The other day, watching some already forgotten video essay while doing the dishes, I yelled—I really did—“Please, surprise me!”
So what a pleasure it was to read perhaps the most singular book I’ve come across in my life, every page a surprise: Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide by Charles Foster. In the book, Foster—an English writer, traveller, veterinarian, taxidermist, barrister, philosopher, and Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford, according to his Wikipedia page—attempts to live as various animals.
When I told my boyfriend about the book, he asked if Foster was serious, and if so, how serious was he: the answer is that he is both deadly earnest about the project while acknowledging its absurdity from the first page to the last. Here’s how Foster describes his project in the prologue:
Nature writing has generally been about humans striding colonially around, describing what they see from six feet above the ground, or about humans pretending that animals wear clothes. This book is an attempt to see the world from the height of naked Welsh badgers, London foxes, Exmoor otters, Oxford swifts, and Scottish and West Country deer; to learn what it is like to shuffle or swoop through a landscape that is mainly olfactory or auditory rather than visual. It's a sort of literary shamanism, and it has been fantastic fun.
He writes that he uses two methods: immersion in the physiological and scientific literature about these animals, and immersion in their physical landscape.
It’s a disarmingly frank book, more so than even most memoirs I’ve read. He’s clear about the limitations of his project, about his limitations as a human being: “The challenge in relating the physiology is to avoid being boring and inaccessible. The challenge in saying what it's like to eat earthworms is to avoid being whimsically ridiculous.” Or: “By setting myself the subject of swifts, I was setting myself up to fail. It was rather stupid.” He is something of a hippie, now—he wasn’t always that way. He used to be a hunter. He doesn't have pure love in his heart for all nature: despises cats, he can’t stand the winter.1 He believes in some kinds of shamanism (beyond the merely literary); he tells you so. Part of the book's charm is that it feels like he tells you everything.
The badger chapter is the most grounded, if you can call it that; the chapters become a little bit less so as the book goes on, and by the time we reach the final chapter on swifts, it becomes something like spiritual.
But in the beginning, he constructs a badger sett, which he lives in for a time with one of his sons; they sleep underground during the day, they do indeed eat earthworms, they walk on their hands and knees to see the world from the badger’s landscape. They try experience the world by scent rather than by vision. He writes:
If I had to pick one word for the badger's experience, it would be intimate. Grass and bracken stems brush your face. When you're forcing a new path, every step is like a birth. Water shudders off grass into your eyes. Things slide away. Slide, hop, rush. You don't just absorb the world; you make it. You make the fear that rustles away on every side.
He does all this and more, much more: as an otter, he submerses himself naked in rivers; as a red deer, he is hunted; as a fox he eats from the trash, which causes some consternation:
The more respectably dressed you are, the harder it is to be a fox. No one has ever accused me of being respectably dressed, but even so, I realized I should be even more shabbily shambolic than usual. Someone in unstained trousers and and an unripped sweater looks criminal if he's raking through a herniated bin bag, but if you're dirty, tired, and slumped, no one minds. You're translucent. People look through you. The grubbier you are, the more translucent you are. If you're on all fours, sniffing at a sack, you're invisible. Except to the authorities. And even there, sleeping is more offensive than doing.
He views otters with disdain. (“Having a good time was inauthentic. Otters don’t.”) Another surprise, that he didn't choose to try to experience the lives only of animals he likes. On the other hand, he is worshipful of swifts; for many years, they were more or less his religion. “Becoming a swift?” he writes. “I might as well try to be God.” Later, he continues,
I can travel the same route as the swift, though not as enthusiastically, and not as influentially. I've tried. Their annual migrations, crossing and recrossing the equator, stitch the earth together. They keep the two halves from falling apart. It's practical, surgical tikkun olam.
I can imagine that some readers would be put off by this turn towards the spiritual; I am instead left convinced that to try to divorce the nature from the ethereal in this book would be to leave it stunted, incomplete.
Why? Why does he do all this? He answers this question in the prologue and answers it differently in the epilogue. In the prologue, he writes:
What's an animal? It's a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes from and of which it consists. What's a human? It's a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists—but a more stilted, stammering conversation than that of most wild animals... I want to have a more articulate talk with the land.
As for the epilogue: read it yourself!
I don’t imagine I’ll ever read another book that I would say is like this one, but if I one day read something else so singular, I’ll consider myself very fortunate indeed.
Your friend,
Smalls
1. "This is not a good attitude for someone writing a book about the natural world. I'm supposed to feign a cheerful fascination with all the faces of the land; to talk merrily about the joys of storm and frost and woolly socks... But I can't do the winter. You should ask for 25 percent off the price of this book."↩