I.
The first image came in black and white: slashes of sable, rosettes, slender legs. Echo’s eyes were zipped shut, her face marked with lines as if dripping with tears. Several babies curled up at her belly on the floor of a straw-lined den. I was close enough to their pile of spots that their purrs were audible: their bodies inflated with air and hummed as they exhaled, together forming a symphony of breath. For a brief moment, Echo startled—then they all shifted, jolted awake, tilting their faces toward her with barely opened eyes. Paws pressed against heads as one stretched into a belly-up position, a single leg in the air, its body sandwiched between those of its siblings.
At home, I sat in a dark room nearly three thousand miles away. Outside my window, rain clattered on the deck. I touched the screen of my laptop and counted their heads with my finger: one, two, three, four, five—and Echo—each with a set of paws, a head, tail, eyes, ears. They were being streamed across the Cheetah Cub Cam, operated by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) in Front Royal, Virginia. That first evening I watched for forty-five minutes as they cycled through this pattern of sleep and readjustment. Echo rolled backward, creating a cradle with her body; two cubs lay inside. A pair in the corner embraced. The next day I tuned in and it was more of the same: sleep, stir, wake, rest. By the end of the week I was running the live stream on a separate monitor on my desk, turning toward it when a shuffle of straw indicated movement, or when I paused for a break from whatever task I was working on. I stopped, then looked.
Echo, an eight-year-old cheetah from White Oak Conservation in Florida, gave birth at SCBI in September of 2023 to three male and two female cubs. A few days later, the six were broadcast through SCBI’s platform: black-and-white night cams transformed into color at dawn, capturing them as they moved between two dens constructed in the maternity yard where they lived, each rigged with its own cam. These moments were joy-filled and felt oddly mesmerizing, despite the divide between us. I attuned my attention to their movements, and they absorbed me in what felt like an act of magic. Without registering the time, I watched for hours, and while I did, I thought of nothing else.
II.
In 1994, one of the first animal webcams was installed in a forty-gallon aquarium at the Netscape offices in Mountain View, California. Every three to four seconds, it broadcast images of fish to the World Wide Web, a novelty that sparked curiosity and delight. At its peak, one hundred thousand unique visits were made to the FishCam each day. Now an estimated sixteen thousand webcams—streaming from parks, zoos, museums, aquariums, and conservation centers all over the world—provide viewers with live footage of animals. There are so many streams available; reference websites like mangolinkcam.com aggregate these webcams by animal type, directly linking viewers to host sites where they can find exactly what they’re looking for. Click on “Aquatic,” and links to the California Academy of Sciences, the Aquarium of the Pacific, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium (MBA) appear. Once you’re on MBA’s live cam site, choose from several subcategories: “Aviary,” “Kelp Forest,” “Monterey Bay,” “Open Sea,” “Penguin,” “Moon Jelly,” “Shark,” and “Spider Crab.” Visit the “Sea Otter Cam” to view their feeding, handling, and examinations; visit the “Jelly Cam” to observe sea nettles, their umbrella-like bodies pulsing inside the screen’s frame before slowly drifting out of view.
Online, in a honeybee hive in Buchloe, Germany, a collective thrums and vibrates. An osprey nest webcam in Charlo, Montana, operated by the Owl Research Institute, focuses on a pair of birds delivering a series of sticks to their nest. The Cape East camera, run by Polar Bears International in Wapusk National Park, pans horizontally across the frozen tundra as it searches for activity on the horizon, spots of brown earth emerging where snow has melted. Sandhill cranes in Gibbon, Nebraska; a puffin burrow on Machias Seal Island; a pair of koalas at the San Diego Zoo. The streams are two-dimensional, plotless, unedited. It became clear in my early days of watching that the magnetic pull I experienced couldn’t be attributed to joy alone. The webcams are educational; they steward connections with nature and provide entertainment, and it’s possible these aspects contribute to a sense of elation in viewing. But the cheetahs’ lives—like those of the other animals—were in most every respect very, very mundane. In the time I spent watching them, they mostly just slept. Despite the monotony, I quietly observed them, sitting on the couch in the evening with the stream playing on my phone as I folded laundry. In looking, I was taken away. Transported. Or at least I thought I was.
The concept of memento mori, translated from Latin as “remember that you must die,” traces as far back as ancient Egypt, and has appeared in different forms. In Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, Joanna Ebenstein writes about how skeletons were displayed during feasts, and bronze “banquet ghosts” were passed out as favors to prompt partygoers to savor time. Stoics kept small tokens of death, such as skulls, on their desks, and vanitas oil paintings were filled with time-related symbols that aimed to depict the fleeting nature of life. Smaller memento mori—many of which employed decaying animals such as butterflies, ravens, and snakes as symbols for the death-and-life cycle—were often held close to the body to encourage people to live now, die later, and served as visual cues suggesting that an end comes for us all. The purpose of these tokens was as a kind of aversion therapy and an exercise in placing oneself in the present: meditate on the chosen piece as a reminder of death, and one’s fear of the end will dissipate.
Stoics believed this helped one live more fully—that to put death at the center of each waking moment was in fact to be alive. But what if that token were animated instead of static—living and swimming, playing and purring in the space captured by a webcam stream? These technologies can facilitate an appreciation of the natural world, and awe at the diversity of life forms on earth: animals are breathtaking, but they are also alive in the present moment, and immediately accessible, thanks to the camera’s ability to bridge the distance between us and them. But perhaps more subtly, the webcams also illuminate and sharpen the reality of our own tenuous existence in the material world. We watch not because of the animals’ beauty alone, or because of what we learn from watching, but because the webcam—like a memento mori—trains our attention on the now.
III.
Born in Austria in 1886, ethologist Karl von Frisch spent his childhood gathering flora and fauna on the grounds of his parents’ mill in Brunnwinkl: moss-covered stones, the remains of a frog carcass coated in debris. He amassed a collection of nearly five thousand specimens and more than one hundred live animals, among them his “constant companion,” Tschocki, a parakeet. In his autobiography, A Biologist Remembers, Karl writes that his father, Anton, a physician, initiated him into the world of looking closely, calling him in after a surgery one afternoon to request that Karl examine an organism under a microscope. Soon Karl was spending “hours between the cliffs, motionless, watching the living things [he] could see on and between the slimy green stones just below the surface of the water.” In his observation, he “discovered that miraculous worlds may reveal themselves to a patient observer where the casual passer-by sees nothing at all.” Anton encouraged Karl to keep looking.
After a short stint in medical school, Karl abandoned his studies to pursue zoology, and over time he developed an interest in the animal eye. From that point on, he became fascinated with bees. According to his memoir, after he was first “assigned the solitary bees” for study, he observed how different species’ nests varied in structure, ranging from simple and geometric to intricate and complex. He found they cast a distractive spell on him; sometimes when he was leaving to go for a walk, he’d get only as far as their hives. Entranced by the bees’ interactions, he would sit and observe them instead of venturing out as planned. “I could not tear myself away,” he reflects. “The life of the bees is a magic well,” he famously writes. “The more one draws from it, the more richly it flows.” Karl had found the honeybees’ well, tripped, and fell in.
IV.
As the days of cheetah-viewing passed, I spoke about them with increasing frequency: I dropped the cam’s weblink into my colleagues’ Zoom chat boxes, and spent dinners with friends describing the way they tumbled against one another in the den. When my birthday arrived, my friends enlarged a screenshot image from the Cheetah Cub Cam and fashioned it into a giant greeting card. “Happy birthday to our dearest Keane,” it reads. In the image, Echo sleeps in a corner of the den, her toes pointed toward the cam, as her face turns in repose, the five cheetah cubs piled against her, forming a sea of spots.
Irish philosopher Iris Murdoch refers to the transcendent experience I encountered when observing the cheetahs on my screen as “unselfing.” In her essay “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts,” Murdoch says that these observed moments of beauty—Echo’s spotted pelt, the way the babies nuzzle one another—help shift one’s consciousness away from one’s own egocentric preoccupations to something outward. Of a somewhat parallel experience of observing a bird outside, she writes, “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.” Murdoch’s encounter with the bird and mine with the cheetah family result in a similar effect: relief from the self. Breath and fur and wings and claws transport us entirely to the present moment, and become meditative objects, like the Stoics’ tokens. As Murdoch sees it, these encounters with nature teleport us away from the backward gaze or future-trips that the Stoics advised us to avoid. Many of us click the links and lean into the screen because that magical feeling created through the eye of the webcam is like traveling to a space outside ourselves; in encountering animals, we gain the ability to shift our consciousness.
Murdoch further suggests in this essay that unselfing is elevated by things that are different enough from us, and in a similar vein, the critic John Berger, in his essay “Why Look at Animals,” underscores how our interest in observing them stems precisely from these slight adjacencies. We examine them while keenly noting our similarities and differences, but the animals, Berger notes, “may well look at other species in the same way.” In Berger’s view, animals make no distinction between humans and other living things, and though they resemble us in sentience and mortality, animals lack the ability to “reserve a special look for man”; it’s only we who recognize those differences, aware of ourselves returning their gaze. According to Berger, this distinction is what maintains our distance from them; “only in death” do our similarities converge. There is evidence demonstrating that some animals are in fact aware of death (for example, the study of comparative thanatology has shown that certain animals, such as ants, ravens, chimps, and elephants, are capable of recognizing the deaths of members of their own species). Despite this, we’re the only ones who contemplate it, according to Susana Monsó, author of Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death. Monsó posits that humans alone have “complex death-related rituals and symbolic representations of death,” and are likely the only creatures with “a notion of the inevitability and unpredictability of [it].” We can look at animals, knowing that they’re not burdened by the weight of acknowledging—or denying—the end of life, as we are, and that can provide a kind of vicarious relief. Their days, in their routine and boredom, look a lot like our own, but unlike us, they spend their time looking neither too far back nor too far forward. Murdoch writes, “We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world.” Through the webcams, though, a new world emerges.
V.
Karl continued experimenting with honeybees. Poor vision prevented him from serving in the military, so during World War I, he returned to Vienna to volunteer at a short-staffed hospital, where he took a liking to a nurse named Margarethe Mohr. When he persuaded her to help illustrate a project focused on bacteriology, they spent every evening together in the laboratory he had established in the basement of the hospital, and soon fell in love. Shortly after this bright spot formed in Karl’s life, however, his father, Anton, fell ill and died. “Those were dark times,” he recounts.
Margarethe and Karl married immediately afterward, but during their honeymoon, Karl felt compelled to return to Brunnwinkl, and they cut the trip short. Back at home, Karl returned to the bees. Karl recounts how after his return he became “completely absorbed,” falling immediately, “irresistibly under [their] spell.”
VI.
In 2024, the Friends of Big Bear Valley’s (FOBBV) webcam, which focuses on the nest of a pair of bald eagles, captured the nation’s attention. When Jackie and Shadow laid their eggs in January, thousands of people anticipated the start of the new family 145 feet up a Jeffrey pine tree. Viewers like me saw a story of a pair of expectant parents, and watched as they prepared their nest—five feet wide and six feet deep, overlooking the emerald-rimmed shores of Big Bear Lake—occasionally spatting over the placement of sticks and incubation shifts. During one sixty-two-hour period, Jackie went without food, standing guard at the edge of the nest as snow cascaded in and buried her completely. By Leap Day, in late February, Jackie and Shadow’s eggs were put on “Pip Watch,” the official window of time of their expected hatching. But as the early days of March passed, and the first laid egg surpassed the typical thirty-five-day gestation, viewers began losing hope. The Los Angeles Times ran the headline “Big Bear bald eagles’ three eggs probably won’t hatch: ‘Makes my heart hurt.’” Weather, altitude, and nutrition were all suspected reasons why the environmentally sensitive eggs weren’t viable, but no definitive explanation was found, only that they wouldn’t bear life as planned.
For another month the pair endured harsh weather, continued arranging the long sticks of their nest, and waited. It was hard to observe Jackie and Shadow persisting in caring for their eggs, knowing they had far surpassed their incubation period, yet tens of thousands of people still tuned in each day, realizing that the lives the eggs carried had come to an end. Finally, on March 26, the log recorded by FOBBV moderators stated, “It appears Jackie and Shadow are starting to withdraw from incubation. It usually does not happen momentarily, it is a process. The nest was left seemingly unattended for 15 & 24 min today.” Around two weeks later they wrote: “Jackie spent most of the night on the front porch, a sign that she is letting go. Shadow seems to be more broody at the moment. Hopefully he will eventually take his cues from Jackie.” Four days later—nearly seventy days after the eggs were laid—they lost their structural integrity and collapsed. Why would so many people have kept watching over that long month if underneath all that looking there wasn’t an interest in observing how the birds would face the embryos’ death?
I watched as Shadow stood in the nest, inspecting the eggs’ remains, and I thought of my own mother, who had died four years earlier. I didn’t know what he felt, picking at the remains with what appeared to be puzzlement, perhaps attempting to make sense of what was left in the bed of straw and sticks, but it was familiar to me: What had been in the roost before was now in the past tense. What he had tenderly cared for had been taken entirely out of his present view.
In The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years, historian Philippe Ariès argues that the death toll of World War I changed the way humans acknowledged death in Western society. Where death events were once made into spectacles through memorialization portraits of the deceased, jewelry fashioned from their hair, and grand public displays of mourning, after the war, this pageantry was replaced with a repudiation of death. “Death,” Ariès writes, “has been banished.” He explains how “the tears of the bereaved have become comparable to the excretions of the deceased”; overt attention toward death was newly perceived as a pathology. Extending this idea further, the anthropologist Ernest Becker, author of The Denial of Death, argues that we drive ourselves into “blind obliviousness” by distractions like games and tricks and ways of spending our time “far removed from the reality” of what he calls the “terror of death.” He concludes that until we develop a relationship with our own mortality, the refusal to acknowledge our impending demise amounts to existential dread. We fear death, so we deny it; we attempt to transcend it, but rarely confront the details of our own potential ends.
But I wonder if watching animals in savage, wild, and sometimes death-expectant circumstances every day somehow allows us to contemplate death in oblique—and therefore less unsettling—ways. During the COVID pandemic, many people turned to animal webcams to pass the time. A series of online articles promoted their various forms of relief: “15 Animal Live Streams Better Than Anything on Netflix” (Fodor’s); “These Wildlife Webcams Will Cure Your Cabin Fever” (Condé Nast Traveler); “19 Live Animal Webcams to Get You Through Lockdown” (Country Living). Viewers tuned in to follow the animals’ unedited lives: grooming, sleeping, forming webs, and separating fruit from its skin. The redundancy of life sequestered at home had begun taking its toll on people around the world, but the animals went on, unbothered by the simple routines of their days, unaware, as far as we knew, of the tidal shift the virus had wrought on human life. Faced with the staggering death counts in headlines, viewers could toggle to the animals’ oblivion; at times I could feel my own self escaping, and I felt comforted as I watched them eat, groom, and sit. The webcams were signs of life while death was so sharply in focus.
Viewing animals helps us observe the duality of life and death: we can escape from the grip of death’s future doom and look without feeling as if we’re staring straight into an abyss. The webcam can be the distraction and the confrontation at the same time.
VII.
In the years following his father’s passing, Karl threw himself into his study of honeybees; the only time he spent away from work was for Margarethe’s birthday. He developed ways to condition the bees and designed special cardboard boxes for their observation; he replaced the sugar water used during honeybee experiments with linden blossoms, then poppies, then roses. He created an elaborate coding system, numbered each bee’s abdomen with dots of blue and red paint, and hung white sheets to track their movements as they flew. In a breakthrough that led to a Nobel Prize, Karl discovered that honeybees communicate with waggle dances to show their hive mates the distance and direction of food sources based on the position of the sun. He pioneered the use of video presentations during scientific talks, projecting for the first time animated versions of the honeybees for crowds to view. “The dance of the bees is a fascinating spectacle,” he writes, “but one that can never be conveyed by words alone.” But more death came Karl’s way: of his mother and then of his beloved parrot, Tschocki. He watched the honeybees for thousands of hours and swam deeper into the well.
VIII.
Waiting in line at the grocery store, I watched the cheetah stream. Sometimes in the car I listened only to the sounds of the cam: Echo’s trills, the cubs’ purrs, or the drum of rain against the plastic flap of their enclosure. I looked at it first thing in the morning, and then again before bed. When I lay awake at night, sometimes I pulled up the feed to watch them sleep, the light from my phone often stirring my husband awake.
“What are you doing, Kristin?” he’d ask softly.
“I’m watching the cheetahs,” I’d say, turning over to obscure the screen’s light.
One morning I watched as two cubs shivered in one of the dens, their back ends and mantles slick with strips of ice. One huddled in the corner by itself with a tucked tail as it trilled at the others. Echo returned, shivering, with a snow-covered pelt, and the cubs groomed themselves as she churred at another cub visible through the doorway of their den, its straw lining dampened by the cubs’ bodies. I watched as if I were there with them, sitting quietly in the corner of the den, but in reality I was three thousand miles away, where the wind outside my window ruffled a neighbor’s tree, spreading yellow petals onto the wet concrete.
That feeling of proximity I experienced is created through webcam features that seemingly diminish the distance between viewers and animals. Telepresence—the ability of videos to make things appear closer than they actually are—is in some instances heightened by operators controlling the live cameras. Echo and the cubs were behind a static cam, but they appeared as if they were inches from my eyes, their breaths and the patter of raindrops against the den as audible as if I were inside it with them. Although the collapsed distance is illusory, these close frames create the appearance of a shared atmosphere. In one research study of brown bears in Katmai National Park and Preserve, viewers watching remote webcams had equal or even greater emotional connections to the brown bears than those watching them live in person. Without the illusion of proximity, none of this would have been possible.
When we watch the animals on the webcams, we’re together with them in the present tense, despite the discontinuity in space-time, and our mirror neurons help attenuate us to them. In the 1980s, researchers studied the brains of macaque monkeys as they completed certain tasks, and then as they watched their fellow primates complete the same tasks. The scientists noticed that the same neuron fired during both engagements, indicating that the neurons help interpret the actions of others. Also observed in human brains, these neurological “mirrors” help us read what others are doing, predict what they’ll do next, and feel empathy toward them in familiar situations. When Jackie and Shadow prepared for their eggs to hatch, or when Echo groomed her babies, we personally identified with those actions and assumed their internal response. When Echo swatted at the cubs’ attempts at play, I felt rejection. When Jackie looked at the collapsed eggs, I felt despair.
These moments with the webcams had somehow shaken me out of my constant, trancelike backward glance by thrusting me into the present. They seemed to keep my mother and her death always present, while also reminding me that, whether I liked it or not, my existence without her carried on.
IX.
As I spent more time watching the cheetahs, the memory of my mother’s death and the webcam began to intersect. Sometimes I could picture her on the other side of the camera, lying on the straw-covered floor of the cheetah den, staring into the one patch of light cutting into the structure, before she slipped away from me. In my mind’s eye, a cheetah entered the enclosure through the plastic flap and obfuscated a part of my mother’s body as it lay against her with its coat of spots and molasses-colored nose. As another cub arrived, and then another, they covered her legs and then her arms with their ears and whiskers and long, narrow paws. Her hands and feet and hair slowly became eclipsed by the cheetahs’ exhalations and their winding, dark markings. The den filled with breath and movement, but soon it was only the cheetahs’; by the time Echo entered and reclined against her babies, my mother had become buried underneath them: there was nothing left for me to see but the cheetahs and their unmistakable life force.
X.
The winter skies changed to spring skies. Most mornings I tuned in to an empty cheetah den, the creases their bodies made during sleep still visible in the hay. By then the six-month-old cubs were spending more time in their yard, outside the eye of the webcam, and the combination of our time-zone difference and their developmental stage meant I was lucky to catch even a glimpse of them. But one evening as I watched, Echo rested at the enclosure’s flap, facing the dark night. The cubs were lying in the corner of the den when one stirred, lifted itself from the floor, moved its body into the corner, and then shifted its face toward the center of the webcam. For the first time I saw both eyes—pupils like dark marbles in circles of white, turned directly toward me. It appeared as if it might step out of the screen into my room, coming so close I could see the wet of its nose. I was closer than I’d ever been to any wild animal, and as I looked into its eyes I was flooded with a feeling of sublimity. I screenshotted a perfect image of its face centered in the frame, peering into the camera.
But when the cub pulled away and I reviewed the image I’d captured, I was reminded of the unidirectionality of the connection. Murdoch’s kestrel could look back, but my cheetah couldn’t: it observed only the thing recording it—the small light of the camera reflected back in its irises, evidence of our distance. In the picture, the cub appeared to look at me, but the image was really only a representation of my own self making sense of the moment. “Everything around the image is part of its meaning,” Berger writes. “Its uniqueness is part of the uniqueness of the single place where it is. Everything around it confirms and consolidates its meaning.” It was beautiful to imagine that the cheetahs, whom I’d grown to love, were reflecting the kind of care they showed one another back to me. But if I was being honest with myself, what had actually captured my attention probably had little to do with the cheetahs themselves. I had managed to use the cheetahs’ webcam presence as a way of preventing myself from looking constantly at what death had taken from me. My mother’s absence had mangled my life, shoving me into what felt like an inescapable dark hole. But the webcam shifted my attention, and with it I found myself instead in a kind of well where I could swim inside the present—a well with an opening that let the light in.
One morning a week later, I clicked the Cheetah Cub Cam link on my browser’s Favorites bar, and in place of the rectangular stream, I found an image of a vulture on a branch against a blue sky. “Page not found,” it said. “Sorry we weren’t able to come up with anything for that address. Please try one of the buttons below.”
The cheetah webcam had been turned off for good, and I could no longer look.
XI.
In von Frisch’s final experiment in A Biologist Remembers, he tested the honeybees’ awareness of time. To do this, he stowed them away on a daylong flight to another time zone to determine whether internal clocks or light patterns were regulating their hunger. Twenty-four hours after their last feeding, he found the bees waiting at their food dish, showing that they possessed their own rhythmic sense of time. Many animals share this awareness that drives them to anticipate meals. Some animals, like crows, can even plan for the future. But as far as we know, they do not wrestle with the concept of time, nor are they plagued by the same worries as we are. They are beautiful. They are good. They do not doomscroll. They do not despair about what is to come. They do not live in the past, swimming in regrets. They are alive in the here and now. For some of us, the webcams are a purely beautiful and silly distraction—but for others, they can give us a chance to see life in a different way, not necessarily because the animals are ultimately so different from us, but because they are not.
XII.
In Virginia in the late spring, Route 522 snakes through miles of green. At the exit for Front Royal, I pass a jiujitsu studio, a Moose Lodge, and a hospice thrift store. Soon lawns, churches, and a long line of people at Spelunker’s Frozen Custard & Cavern Burgers appear. Signs of life. The exit for the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute is a narrow driveway that I nearly miss: I have come here to stand on the other side of the web camera’s eye, and to look instead with my own.
I press my sneakers deeply into a spongy mat filled with sanitizing solution at the gate to the cheetah yards. The lead biologist of SCBI’s cheetah care team and a staff member walk me past a trio of males and pairs of females, and I stand at the edge of each yard searching for rosettes in the gold-ribbed grass. Finally, at the end of a long, enclosed lot, I count six heads in the distance. I’m in the same place as they are: Echo’s gaze shifts toward us, and then so do those of her five cubs.
When we arrive at the edge of their fenced-in yard, Echo resituates to observe us, and four of the five cubs rise to approach the fence. That feeling in my body—the one I felt the first time I saw them—swiftly resurfaces: a kind of bursting at the seams. They come so close, I could touch them if I put my hand through the fence. They hiss repeatedly, almost in unison, and one cub stutters, making that same birdlike vocalization I heard from Echo the first time I watched her through the Smithsonian webcam. They’ve grown so much in only a matter of months; they are spectacular in their full spectrum of color. Nothing is between us but the fence.
After several minutes, they recline into a rim of grass, lounge on one another, and roll onto their backs. They take turns stretching against a tree, and I finally see what their life is like off-camera, beyond the four walls of their dens. They lick their paws and groom one another’s mantles, and for the first time, they look back at me—really, their eyes circles of amber, malar stripes running down their faces as severely as on their mother’s. They thump their tails, and when I stand up from my crouched position, they consider me as carefully as I have been considering them for months. I approach to fit the lens of my camera between the barbed wire—and as I do, one comes over to look at me: we lock eyes.
I would like to say that there is shared meaning conveyed between us, that what I feel, the cheetah also feels, but I likely won’t ever know this. John Berger writes, “No animal confirms man, either positively or negatively,” but we continue to watch the animal cams because behind them is something we recognize as familiar, something that can model for us how to be alive now. “To look,” Berger says, “is an act of choice.” We look to have our seams burst. We look to explain something about this experience of being human. We look to reach closer to some kind of truth. The cub peers at me, and my well fills: that thing bursting inside is magical. In the unfiltered light of day, its eyes are gold coins. I stare into them. The cheetah and I are alive together, breathing into the afternoon.
