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. Language: English