decemberthirty: (Default)
I wanted to love Teaching a Stone To Talk, Annie Dillard's collection of essays and occasional writing. I wanted to love it and be challenged by it, to wrestle with it, to be raised up by it and at the same time to be humbled by it as I had done when I read Pilgrim At Tinker Creek three years ago. The first piece in the book, an essay called "Total Eclipse," seemed to promise that I would get what I wanted. The essay is a description of Dillard's experience of watching a solar eclipse near Yakima, Washington in 1979, but of course it is also more than that: a meditation on death, on life, on human perception and what happens when that perception shifts radically and suddenly. The essay is breathtaking, brilliant. Dillard observes so carefully and then brings those observations to the page so precisely that the precision itself becomes thrilling to watch.

Alas, none of the other pieces manage to live up to this stunner. Mostly, I think the problem was that they were too short. That's a little strange for me to say, because ordinarily I love short writing--little slips of stories that gesture rather than speaking, pieces where much remains veiled because there is no room to explicate, bits and pieces with a poetic compression of meaning, where each word does the work of a sentence... But in Teaching a Stone to Talke, the shortness of many of the pieces just left me feeling unsatisfied. I wanted more from Dillard; I wanted the digging, the depth, the grand language that I know she's capable of.

The second best piece, after "Total Eclipse," is the last one, an essay called "Aces and Eights" about a weekend Dillard spent at a cottage somewhere with a nine-year-old girl (a niece, perhaps? The relationship is never made clear.) I'm not sure whether I liked this essay because I read it in a cabin in the woods with my own little two-year-old niece, or because it explores questions dear to my heart: questions of time and memory, the way moments distort in memory, the way the foreknowledge of memory distorts moments even as they're happening. It felt more substantial than many of the other pieces in the book, and was a good strong note on which to end.

I wouldn't tell you to run right out and buy this book, but if you ever come across a copy of "Total Eclipse," read it, my friends. Read it!
decemberthirty: (audubon spoonbill)
I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.

This is Annie Dillard again, from a paragraph early in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, the book that is, it seems, the harvest of which she writes.

I began reading Pilgrim At Tinker Creek at the end of July, and I finished it in late September. That’s a long time to spend with one book, but I could not read this book in bits and idle moments; I had to read it in entire chapters and with full concentration. Even so, I feel that I will need to read this book again, that though I have grasped individual chapters, the wholeness of the book still eludes me.

I use words like wholeness and concentration because they seem intrinsic to Dillard’s project in this book. She chronicles a year of living, walking, and observing in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, but the book is more than just a record of events. It is also an attempt to come to a spiritual understanding of the natural world, and an exploration of the role of humanity in the world. Dillard wrestles with grandeur, intricacy, fecundity, violence, beauty, and what it is to experience the sublime. She is a very sharp observer—her descriptive writing, while sometimes a bit heavy-handed (she admits in an afterword that while writing this book she thought that a sentence “was not quite done until it was overdone.”) is clever, surprising, and very often beautiful—and she sieves her observations through the staggering amount of natural history and theological thought that she has read.

There were a lot of passages in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek that fascinated me and resonated with me. I was intensely envious of Dillard’s deep local knowledge. She knows her valley and her creek in all seasons and all weathers, in its trees and creatures, in the shape of its geography. That is the kind of knowledge of a place that I want to cultivate. Dillard’s writing about seeing, too, seemed to mesh so perfectly with my own experience that it was like she was putting words to thoughts I hadn’t quite had yet: the slow learning that happens when you decide to try to see the natural world, the strangely half-active, half-passive nature of that process… Well, read Dillard; she describes it much better than I do.

But all through the book there was also the matter of my atheism and Dillard’s Christianity. Dillard’s faith is active and seeking, not at all the kind of religious belief that can be so alienating to me, but I still can’t share it. Nevertheless, I don’t feel the kind of unbridgeable gap between myself and Dillard that I sometimes feel with religious people. Perhaps this is the thing that makes me feel like I need to read this book again someday. I get to thinking or writing about the spiritual elements of the book, and I suddenly lose my ability to articulate; maybe if I read it again this won’t happen on my next pass.

I will end with one more quotation, one in which Dillard herself sums up the book far more gracefully than I have done:

There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright.
decemberthirty: (Default)
I watched at the window; I watched at the creek. A new wind lifted the hair on my arms. The cold light was coming and going between oversized, careening clouds; patches of blue, like a ragged flock of protean birds, shifted and stretched, flapping and racing from one end of the sky of the other. Despite the wind, the air was moist; I smelled the rich vapor of loam around my face and wondered again why all that death--all those rotten leaves that one layer down are black sops roped in white webs of mold, all those millions of dead summer insects--didn't smell worse. When the wind quickened, a stranger, more subtle scent leaked from beyond the mountains, a disquieting fragrance of wet bark, salt marsh, and mud flat.

I lay in bed last night and read Annie Dillard on the coming of fall, and it felt profoundly appropriate. Though we still have temperatures that reach the mid-70s, the season has unmistakably changed. My mother gave me apples at Lake Ontario last weekend, and this weekend I baked an apple crisp with cinnamon and pecans. And then, because I had strawberries that were at the end of their life, I baked strawberry muffins. It was lovely to have the oven on and warm smells filling the apartment. And it was lovely to have tea and a strawberry muffin for breakfast this morning. I will have to begin feeding the birds again soon.
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I read "The Dead" last week for the first time in several years. It was more wonderful than I had anticipated to return to this story which is so beautiful and familiar in all of its particulars: Freddy Malins turning up screwed at the party; Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia bustling on the stairs; Gabriel being called a West Briton by Molly Ivors; and then Gretta on the stairs, listening to the faint music that reminds her of Michael Furey... I was overcome with emotion reading the end of the story, much more than I had been the first time I read it, and I wondered if this story might actually be Joyce's greatest work. Could it be better than Ulysses? Is that possible?

This weekend I read Katherine Mansfield's novella, "At the Bay." It was a strange work, made of loosely connected sections that felt quite slight individually, but added up to...something. Not a cohesive narrative exactly, but something that felt like an Impressionist portrait of a community. She seems to look at her subjects only sidelong, yet to come away with penetrating insight. I have never read Mansfield before, so I can't say if this is typical of her work.

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My goal for my last year of grad school is not to be frantic. To work steadily, every day, and to have that be enough. The previous two years have been characterized by stress and last minute scrambles to finish work, to grade papers, to throw words onto a page, to do what I needed to do to get through the next day. And I don't want to do that anymore.
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