If you’re also focused on the presidential election, you may be ready to change your focus. Catherine Randell’s extraordinary book Vanishing Treasures (originally published in the UK under the title The Golden Mole) lifts readers out of the here and now and invites us to look at the wider picture. .
Randell is a publishing genius. Rooftoppers, a middle grade children’s book published in 2013, was inspired by her own adventures as an undergraduate at Oxford University, where she climbed brick walls and dug drains. I climbed up and got a great view of the “City of Dreaming Spires.” More recently, Randell wrote Super Infinite, an acclaimed biography of metaphysical poet John Donne, and the best-selling fantasy novel Impossible Creatures.
In short, Randell is like a Renaissance woman, someone who writes with the grace and erudition that marked her era. Vanishing Treasures is a bestiary, a collection of strange and common creatures. All of them are more surprising than you expected. Randell said they are all “endangered or endangered subspecies (including subspecies), because there are currently no species on Earth that are Because it almost doesn’t exist.”
Randell begins the book with an epigraph by British essayist and mystery writer GK Chesterton, a writer whose reputation is on the verge of extinction.
Below are 23 very short essays on creatures ranging from wombats to spiders. From raccoon to tuna. For anyone with extraordinary abilities who could be the catalyst for a breakthrough, Randell’s essay is a must-read. For example, listen to the opening sentence of her essay about swifts. The swift gets its name from the fact that it is the fastest flying bird.
Swifts, unlike other birds, are suited to the sky. They weigh less than a chicken egg, have sickle-like wings and a fork-like tail, and eat and sleep on the wings. … (Swallows) mate in brief hollow collisions and are the only birds to do so, dispelling clouds to wash away and flying slowly with wings outstretched through the gentle rain.
As you can hear, Randell’s essay is more than just a Wikipedia entry about the natural world. Rather, they are deeply felt, lyrical, often witty, and occasionally gruesome evocations of the living wonders she investigates. For example, her essay on “hermit crabs” begins with the shocking line, “It was probably a hermit crab that ate Amelia Earhart.”
Randell continues to explain. The uninhabited island in the western Pacific where Earhart’s plane may have crashed, and where 13 (but only 13) human bones comparable to Earhart’s size were discovered, remains to this day “home of a colony.” Hermit crabs: the world’s largest land crabs…the oldest ones (crabs) can live over 100 individuals and grow up to 40 inches in diameter. It’s too big to fit inside. The bathtub is the perfect size for a nightmare. ”
The message that both the savagery and beauty of the animal and human worlds are interconnected runs through these essays. Despite Earhart’s possible fate, it is of course non-human creatures that suffer the most from our contact. “The biggest lie humanity has ever told is that the Earth is ours and we are free to use it as we please. … We have to stop that lie. The world is so rare… , because it’s very wonderful.”
Vanishing Treasures gives readers a first-hand look at some of the miraculous creatures with whom we still share this fragile world. Like other enlightened environmentalists, Randell leaves fear open to possibility. So let’s leave Randell’s tribute to “Earth’s oldest vertebrate,” the Greenland shark. Animals that live for over 500 years. Randell says:
…I find hope in their very ideas. They will experience what kind of revolving chaos we are currently experiencing…and they will experience what will follow that they could not have imagined at the moment: transformation, revelation, liberation. You will experience the possibility of That’s their beauty, breathtaking beauty. they continue. These dull, smelly, half-blind creatures are probably the closest thing to eternity this planet offers.
