A CLOSER LOOK AT Being a Fox

I’d just about given up on London, but the foxes’ faith in it and the intensity of their commitment to it touched me and made me think again. I suspected that if I could get as close to it as they were I’d see it properly, and therefore learn to love it. To hate anything is exhausting. I hoped that the foxes could help me to rest.

When I lived here I was almost anaesthetic. Like the accursed in the psalm, I had eyes but could not see, a nose but could not smell, hands but could not feel, and ears but could not hear. I was constantly being told that this was where it was all happening; where the real business of life was done. Sometimes I could dimly sense that something was happening, but it seemed distant, blurred and muffled, as if I were looking down from a great height through cloudy seawater.

Then, still blind, deaf and anosmic, I started to follow the foxes. Eventually they took my collar between their teeth and swam with me to four islands. On those islands my senses functioned. I could feel and describe things there. The rest of the Atlantean world of the East