A nervous wild thing

1: From “Dictation,” by Cynthia Ozick, 2008

“From the alley below her bedroom window — the flittering panes that sheathed her in a dusky mist of almost-light — Lilian heard a sharp clatter: a metal trash barrel overturned. The fox again, scavenging. A sly fox out of a fable, a fox that belonged in a wood—but there are sightings of foxes in the outlying streets of London, and once, coming home in the winter night from her mother’s, she had glimpsed a brown streak under the lamppost; and then it was gone. And another time, in the early morning — the woman and the animal, both of them solitary, two stragglers separated from the pack, transfixed, staring, panicked into immobility. The fox’s eyes were oddly lit, as if glittering pennies had got into its sockets; its ears stood straight up; its white tail hung low, like a shamed flag; its flanks trembled. A nervous wild thing. It twitched the upper muscle of its long snout—she saw the zigzag glint of teeth, the dangerous grin of ambush. How beautiful it was!"


2: Wes Anderson on Fresh Air, Nov. 23, 2009



“Meryl Streep, she told me that she had a moment just before we started recording this where she saw a fox on her doorstep in England, and the fox looked up and saw her, and they just stared at each other for five minutes. And she sort of had this sort of mesmerizing moment with this animal, and she said she sort of thought about that.”