Nothing Now but Kestrel
I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.
, The Sovereignty of Good (1970) · Excerpt
In this short passage from her philosophical essay “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts,” Murdoch lays out something almost embarrassingly simple. An anxious self, a window, a bird. No special technique, no effort of will. Just the sudden appearance of something real enough to displace the noise inside.
The sequence matters. First comes the brooding, the mind locked in its own feedback loop, calculating injuries to prestige. Then the kestrel arrives, not as a symbol or a lesson, but as a fact. A hovering body in the air, doing what kestrels do. And the self, for a moment, falls away. “There is nothing now but kestrel.” Murdoch is describing a moral event, but anyone who makes things will recognize it as something else too: that interval where the work absorbs us so completely that the monitoring voice goes quiet. The question of whether what we’re making is good enough, original enough, competitive enough dissolves. When those concerns return, as Murdoch observes, they seem “less important.” Not gone, but shifted in scale.
So much of creative life right now takes place in that brooding Murdoch describes, the anxious calculation of where we stand relative to new capabilities, new tools, new economies of production. The worry is real and reasonable. But Murdoch suggests that genuine attention moves in a different direction entirely. It does not answer our anxious questions. It makes us, briefly, forget them. And in that forgetting, something recalibrates. We cannot summon the kestrel. But we can, perhaps, leave the window unshuttered, and notice when something outside ourselves is more interesting than the ongoing drama within.