A particular sentence — "the bird reverted to a feral state" — seized his imagination, and, White later wrote, "A longing came to my mind that I should be able to do this myself. Un libro sull’amore e sulla libertà che è riuscito a interessarmi, colpirmi e stupirmi oltre le mie aspettative.

Che è un bellissimo rapace, più o meno un chilogrammo di peso (la femmina è molto più grande del maschio. He wished to love Gos, but did not know how to express that love; sadly for White and Gos, he could only express that love through domination: “I had loved Gos … He had hated and distrusted me … He had had guts to stand up against love for so long…”. It would be about the efforts of a second-rate philosopher who lived alone in a wood, being tired of most humans in any case, to train a person who was not human, but a bird. The “family tree” that White was apparently referring to — a pedigree of Arthur’s illegitimate son Mordred — was later included in The Once and Future King, in a passage at the end of The Queen of Air and Darkness. The details carry such pain: a lesson ostensibly on repairing a broken feather explains the tragedy of the bird's "hunger-trace," a line of weakness in the feathers from growing when the baby had no food.During the training the bird was restrained by jesses or leather straps around the ankles, holding him initially by a short leash to a perch or the falconer’s padded arm. The word ‘feral’ has a magical potency which allied itself to two other words, ‘ferocious’ and ‘free. Owing to its intimate revelations of his personality, White was reluctant to publish the work, but acquiesced after his publisher happened upon the manuscript during a house visit in 1949. White was also just an interesting man with a preference for solitude and an unyielding curiosity and quest for learning.

Below that is a handwritten inscription, above a drawing of an arrow-pierced heart, which reads “Kew / 12. H. White include: The Once and Future King, The Sword in the Stone, The Book of Merlyn, and The Queen of Air and Darkness.The other thing I appreciated here was the bits of erudition scattered here and there in his allusions to history and literature. penso che se non si ha un'anima da scout (per chi ha la mia età direi un'anima da giovani marmotte) queste parti possano risultare abbastanza pesanti. Una battaglia che non può che terminare con la reciproca accettazione di uomo e animale, abbisognanti l'uno dell'altro per sopravvivere.