In A Beginner’s Faith in Things Unseen John Hay writes from the vantage point of eighty, and like no other American writer on what he calls “the real world.”
Hay returns to memories of a boyhood divided between Manhattan and the deep woods of Sunapee, New Hampshire, to a time when he knew “one should always be outdoors, with the unregistered and the unsigned.” He writes with precision and beauty of pilot whale strandings on Cape Cod’s Outer Beach—and of the attendant human confusion and greed—and of the sweep of a century in which “our modern, owned world is going deaf from listening to its own answers.” Hay keeps company with Maine barn swallows and finds in the Lakota Sioux Grass Dance a way to listen to the wind. Always, through often uncannily affecting language, John Hay shows us just which ceremonies we all must attend to.
“A Beginner’s Faith in Things Unseen provides a sort of retrospective introduction to the mind of a man who has gained a quiet reputation as the elder statesman of American nature writing.”
—Amanda Heller, Boston Sunday Globe
"After a lifetime of study, [Hay] retains the humility and passion of a beginner."
—David Miller, Sewanee Review
"[Hay] believes that we must return to the kind of direct, open, and intuitive relationship with nature that children have....[He] infects his readers with the same sense of wonder and grace."
—Miles Harvey, Outside
"Dispatches from a lifelong pilgrimage of faith in the endurance and overarching power of the natural world....This is among the finest nature writing you'll ever encounter."
—Barbara A. Genco, School Library Journal
“John Hay is one of our very best essayists on the natural world.”
—Peter Matthiessen
“John Hay has been in a running dialogue with the birds of light and fish of darkness for many decades. His writings have enriched our literature, and yet he does not rest on his laurels. Instead, he swims ahead, humbled as ever by the mysteries swarming around him.”
—Gary Paul Nabhan
“No one writes so movingly about the real world as John Hay.”
—Jake Page