On one occasion when I visited Gill, it must have been last summer, I remember us standing in the farm yard, a hazy sky, the warmth in the air, the pillar about a kilometre away, the camera presumably photographing birds as we talked. He told me about a pair of wood pigeons that were nesting in a tree on the property. They’d first appeared four years before, building their nest, laying eggs, hatching them, and feeding their young—and just before the young reached the fledgling age a goshawk had come and taken them. But, the following spring, the pair returned to lay new eggs, feed new young—only for the goshawk to come and take them again, just days before they were ready to fly. Strangely, this didn’t stop the pair from returning, again and again, to the very same place, with the very same result.

The story is a gruesome one. The wood pigeons did not only lose all their young that first spring; they exposed themselves to the same danger again, not just once but three times over, in each case with open eyes. They could do this only because they lack any conception of past or future, living their lives wholly and fully in the now, and in the now there is no goshawk. In the now is the nest, the eggs, the sun, the leaves of the tree, the warm air, the sounds drifting up from below, hunger, thirst, the overwhelming instinct that compels them to feed their screeching young. From the viewpoint of the wood pigeons, their life is no tragedy. They are, on the contrary, joyful: listen to how they coo, see how busily they seek food for their hungry chicks.

Who would not cast away all concern and simply live, simply be? It’s a question that has divided philosophers. According to Søren Kierkegaard, to be present in the world—to be present to oneself in being today, as he put it—is barely distinguishable from entering God’s kingdom. To Martin Heidegger, animals are “poor in the world,” captives of their surroundings and functions, as if hypnotized by them. Their joy is that they know nothing else. But when I look at Gill’s birds again, this whole issue dissolves. It belongs to thoughts, to the writing desk and to books, whereas the birds are in the world, perched on a pillar above the grass, which is long and dry with summer. The air is warm and busy, as it so often is on this flat expanse of land. The bird, a pigeon, sits motionless, looking out into the landscape. Its eyes are as round as marbles, and while compared with our own eyes something much simpler shines in them, their light is nevertheless recognizable to us, for it is life itself.