The Second Body

by Daisy Hildyard

Overview

Every living thing has two bodies. To be an animal is to be in possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be embedded in a worldwide network of ecosystems. When every human body has an uncanny global presence, how do we live with ourselves? In this timely and elegant essay, Daisy Hildyard captures the second body by exploring how the human is a part of animal life. She meets Richard, a butcher in Yorkshire, and sees pigs turned into boiled ham; and Gina, an environmental criminologist, who tells her about leopards and silver foxes kept as pets in luxury apartments. She speaks to Luis, a biologist, about the origins of life; and talks to Nadezhda about fungi in an effort to understand how we define animal life. Eventually, her second body comes to visit her first body when the river flooded her home last year. The Second Body is a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910695470
Publisher:	Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publication date:	08/07/2018
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Daisy Hildyard holds a PhD in the history of science, and has previously published essays on the language of science, and on seventeenth-century mathematics. Her first novel Hunters in the Snow received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. She lives with her family in North Yorkshire, where she was born.

Read an Excerpt

You are stuck in your body right here, but in a technical way, you are also in India and Iraq, you are in the sky causing storms, and you are in the sea herding whales towards the beach. You probably don’t feel your body in those places: it is as if you have two distinct bodies. You have an individual body in which you exist, eat, sleep and go about your day-to-day life. You also have a second body which is involved with foreign countries and whales. Climate change makes every animal body implicated in the whole world, but some animals are more worldly than others. Indeed, writers have argued that theories about global trade and man-made climate change are signs of human self-obsession. Embarrassing, actually, it’s like we all think that somebody is waving at us when in reality they are waving at somebody behind us. We need everything on earth to be a product of our bodies in the way a child needs to put a marble in her mouth.
It feels to me that this global truth is alienated from its real life in an animal body. When a small brown pigeon got stuck in my kitchen - it was slipperier than I’d have expected, it went out of my hands like a fish…that was a real thing. When I saw satellite impressions of ice shelves breaking off and floating away…that was the truth. In my job, I speak to people who work with animals, and they, too, often give me an impression that there are different ways to exist in a body; that there is a truthful body and a real one.
The true things: satellite images; shots of chromosomes; hydrocarbon spreadsheets, don’t always feel real. Meanwhile, the real living bodies don’t feel like they have much to do with the complicated truth about life on earth. I cannot make myself much interested in this truth – it feels far off. I don’t want to hear about climate change or the biosphere, I want to hear about real people and real creatures. But there is a sense that the horizon is moving nearer – that I should be paying attention, because one day the ice shelf will come ripping through the tissue of my body – through everybody – even if it appears, for now, that the bodies all around me are intact. When I approached my pigeon it made a squeaking sound in fear and I realised it couldn’t fly. It still had threads of pale fluff sticking out of its neckfeathers so it must have been young. It did occur to me that I could have wrung its neck and eaten it, but I didn’t, I cared for it for a while, it was quite greedy and it fell off the edge of a bucket once while trying to get at seed. Its legs leaned at an angle back from its claws: L. The talons curved up out of the ends of each toe and didn’t seem to actually touch the ground when it walked. It was definitely using its eyes - a very round pale brown eye which blinked. I could see its mind in its body. It turned its head every few seconds to get a proper view of me.
I kept it in the shed and fed it seed. It still wouldn’t fly. I was worried it would be attacked by a rat in there and one day I lost patience, I thought: it has to live for itself. I turned it out into the yard and closed the shed door. The pigeon spent hours scuffling around on the concrete, and I nearly caught it and let it back in the shed, but then suddenly it was up on the roof. I didn’t see it get there, and it rested for a while. Perhaps it will fall, I thought, but I was watching when two other pigeons, both grey, both larger than my pigeon, came for it. They were all on the grey roof together and then they all, at the same time, opened their wings and floated into the air, incredibly slowly. They were close together, and their wings made a kind of dome shape from where I was standing. It didn’t look like they were flying so much as it looked like they were being pulled into space. I could see the three of them lifted further, and eventually they were so far away that I couldn’t see them. It was December and the sky was almost white. Afterwards I went to the sink and cleaned and dried my hands. It was strange that the pigeon had previously been constrained by them.

Editorial Reviews

‘Part amateur detective, part visionary, Hildyard’s voice is so intelligent, beguiling and important. Like Sir Thomas Browne or even Annie Dillard, her sly variety of scientific inquiry is incandescent.’
— Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors

‘These are fretful, questioning essays with occasional flashes of beauty, demanding of readers that they think about anthropogenic disruption of climate and ecology.’
— Gavin Francis, Guardian

‘In its insistence on the illusion of individuality and on the participation of human animals in the whole of earthly life, The Second Body might be an ancient text; in its scientific literacy and its mood of ecological disquiet, Daisy Hildyard’s book is as contemporary as the morning paper. If ecstasy means to go outside oneself, the word usually carries connotations of chaos and inarticulacy. Here, however, is a precise and eloquent ecstasy – and this slender book about who we are beyond our own skins is likewise much larger than itself.’
— Benjamin Kunkel, author of Utopia or Bust

‘At only 118 pages, The Second Body reads like an extra-lengthy New Yorker article, invoking a similar journalistic rhythm that favors one unbroken reading … the reward for staying with it in a single sitting allows for the true beauty of Hildyard’s project to unfurl like a planet-sized nickelodeon, one that can be appreciated on many levels.’
— Michael Barron, Culture Trip

‘In The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard gives a body to an idea in a series of curious encounters that take us from the floor of a butcher shop to the computer room of a biologist to the wreckage of a flooded home. Heady and visceral both, this essay revels in the mess and splendour of the world.’
— Eula Biss, author of On Immunity

‘Daisy Hildyard has turned her curious, sifting, brilliantly original mind onto the pressing ecological questions of our age. The result is a series of essays as captivating as they are delightful, their object no less than to quietly rewire our thinking.’
— Sarah Howe, author of Loop of Jade

‘Hildyard takes us on a white-knuckle philosophical ride through identity, agency, ecology and molecular biology, leaving us vitally disconcerted, but with a strange new sense of community and solidarity. A curious, oblique, important, and fascinating book.’
— Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast

‘Hildyard's writing stretches the mind, pushes you to not just acknowledge but feel the connection between a piece of meat at the butcher's shop and the flight path of a pigeon.’
— Alexandra Kleeman, Buzzfeed

From the Publisher