When our guest, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg, was seventeen, he landed a summer job tracking the flightpaths of birds in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. One day, while transcribing the sweeping flightpath of a hawk, he suddenly lost sight of the creature. He sat down, listening, and heard a rustle in the leaves above him.
The raptor was sitting on a branch “right above me,” Rothenberg writes in his new book, Nightingales in Berlin, “looking down at the map where I’d been tracking his movements, as if he’d figured out what I was doing, much to his displeasure.”
Rothenberg was suddenly inspired. He set the map aside, picked up a small penny whistle, and began to play along, joining the chorus of birdsong overhead.
