The Irony of the Wild-“Patience”
Macdonald writes, “The British Falconers’ Club worked out that for the cost of importing a goshawk from the Continent for falconry, you could afford to bring in a second bird and release it. Buy one, set one free…You just found a forest and opened the box. Likeminded falconers started doing this all over Britain. The hawks came from Sweden, Germany and Finland: most were huge, pale, taiga forest gosses. Some were released on purpose…They survived, found each other and bred, secretly and successfully. Today their descendants number around four hundred and fifty pairs…Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands.” Although the goshawks are wild animals, their endurance is attributed to manmade activities. The Falconers’s acts of importing and setting free the goshawks was instrumental in the revival of the goshawk population. Had the Falconers not imported them, then there would be no goshawks in Britain.
The irony of “free cake and ice-cream”- “Lost”
The narrator recounts, “He disappeared, then reappeared at the table with an expression of anxious concern, and a double chocolate brownie with ice-cream and a sprig of mint stuck in the top, on the house, dusted with cocoa powder and icing sugar. On a black plate. I stared at it. That is ridiculous, I thought. Then, What is it? I pulled the mint out of the ice-cream, held it up, looked at its two small leaves and its tiny cut stem smeared with chocolate, and thought, This isn’t going to grow again. Touched and bewildered that a waiter had thought that free cake and ice-cream would comfort me, I looked at the cut end of the mint. It reminded me of something. I groped for what it could be." The waiter brings the narrator "free cake and ice-cream" anticipating that the narrator would be comforted after losing her father. However, the narrator is bewildered at the act instead of delighting in the free accompaniments. The mint reminds the narrator of possible death because it has been detached from the main plant confirming that it will cease to live and be consumed by a human. The “cake and ice cream” are not sufficient to contain the narrator’s anguish.
