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Chapter 30: The Moving Earth
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in H is for Hawk, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Living with the Wild
Fear, Grief, and Loss
Love, Trust, and Freedom
Time and History
Social Divisions
Summary
Analysis
To write this book, Macdonald needed to learn more about T. H. White than she could gather from his published works and biographies. She spends a week in Texas, where his papers are kept and although this gave her stacks of notes and many ideas, it isn’t enough. So, she visits Stowe estate and White’s cottage. Stowe’s extensive gardens with their moralistic hints about “modern vice and […] ancient virtue” repel her. She understands why White fled; she wants to, too. His cottage is different. There, she can almost hear history retreating. When she catches a glimpse of the current owner from the corner of her eye, for a second, she thinks it’s White himself. But then she reminds herself that White is dead. She chooses to leave him to his peaceful rest. She turns and goes home.
Chasing White through his papers in Texas gave Macdonald much of the material she works with in her book. But she still wanted to feel a more vital connection with a man who’d come to mean so much to her during the period this book covers. But when she visits his cottage, she realizes that she’s fallen prey to the same impulse that possessed White—she’s tried to find community by casting herself into an imagined past. It’s fitting, then, that she ends her book with the conscious decision to leave the dead—White, but also, by extension, her father—to their peaceful rest, touched by the impact they’ve had on her life. At the same time, however, she keeps her face turned toward the future rather than the past.
Themes
