Still Life

“Those little moments that nobody else notices. Little sacred moments of the everyday. She picked up her camera (click). Like that moment (click). Or that.”

Margaret takes photographs of everything she can because she wants to remember and appreciate the small, beautiful moments in life. This speaks to Winman’s message in Chapter 1 about appreciating life while you can. Little moments can be as profound as big moments, and those little moments are the ones that prove you’re still alive and capable of happiness. This is an especially important message in the context of war.

“The squeal of birds overhead delighted him. He and they had traveled hundreds of miles north against all odds to arrive at that place in time—swifts at the end of March and him in June—and the catalog of near misses and lucky escapes that had accompanied his journey across Africa, Sicily and up the Adriatic would have astonished priests and astrologers alike. Something had been watching over him. Why not a swift?”

Ulysses Temper and the birds are paralleled in this quote as symbols of the beauty of life. Both the birds and Ulysses have miraculously survived much conflict in their lives. Despite all the terrors they’ve seen, the birds still sing, and Ulysses is able to still appreciate the natural beauty of the world around him. This quote provides a tone of hope in the context of a horribly destructive war. The allusion to the species of the swift is important; this bird is also called “the devil’s bird” because of their inaccessibility. Spotting them is rare, so Ulysses seeing a swift is a sign of unexpected beauty.