The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

by Annie Dillard

  Once I stood on a humped rock on nearby Purgatory Mountain, watching through binoculars the great autumn hawk migration below, until I discovered that I was in danger of joining the hawks on a vertical migration of my own. I was used to binoculars, but not, apparently, to balancing on humped rocks while looking through them. I staggered. Everything advanced and receded by turns; the world was full of unexplained foreshortenings and depths. A distant huge tan object, a hawk the size of an elephant, turned out to be the browned bough of a nearby loblolly pine. I followed a sharp-shinned hawk against a featureless sky, rotating my head unawares as it flew, and when I lowered the glass a glimpse of my own looming shoulder sent me staggering. What prevents the men on Palomar from falling, voiceless and blinded, from their tiny, vaulted chairs?

  I reel in confusion; I don’t understand what I see. With the naked eye I can see two million light-years to the Andromeda galaxy. Often I slop some creek water in a jar, and when I get home, I dump it in a white china bowl. After the silt settles I return and see the tracings of minute snails on the bottom, a planarian or two winding round the rim of water, roundworms shimmying frantically, and finally, when my eyes have adjusted to these dimensions, amoebae. At first the amoebae look like muscae volitantes, those curled moving spots you seem to see in your eyes when you stare at a distant wall. Then I see the amoebae as drops of water congealed, bluish, translucent, like chips of sky in the bowl. At length I choose one individual and give myself over to its idea of an evening. I see it dribble a grainy foot before it on its wet, unfathomable way. Do its unedited sense impressions include the fierce focus of my eyes? Shall I take it outside and show it Andromeda, and blow its little endoplasm? I stir the water with a finger, in case it’s running out of oxygen. Maybe I should get a tropical aquarium with motorized bubbles and lights, and keep this one for a pet. Yes, it would tell its fissioned descendants, the universe is two feet by five, and if you listen closely you can hear the buzzing music of the spheres.

  Oh, it’s mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. On one of those nights, I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I can’t see. Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribbon of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small. No culture explains, no bivouac offers real heaven or rest. But it could be that we are not seeing something. Galileo thought comets were just an optical illusion. This is fertile ground: Since we are certain that they’re not, perhaps we can look at what our scientists have been saying with fresh hope. What if there are really gleaming, castellated cities hung upside down over the desert sands? What limpid lakes and cool date palms may our caravans have passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger.

  I turn from the window. I’m blind as a bat, sensing from every direction only the echo of my own thin cries.

  Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it. It is, as Ruskin says, “not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.” My eyes alone can’t solve analogy tests using figures, the ones that show, with increasing elaborations, a big square, then a small square in a big square, then a bigger triangle. I have to say the words, describe what I’m seeing. If Tinker Mountain erupted, I’d likely notice. But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I must maintain in my head a running description of the present. It’s not that I’m especially observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio.

  When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head. Some days when a mist covers the mountains, when the muskrats won’t show and the microscope’s mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and, with a steel knife, claw a rent in the top to peep out, even at the risk of a fall.

  But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway, transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

  It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching shiners the size of minnows feeding over the muddy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and—flash!—the sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn’t watch for it. It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over a dun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creek’s surface, very slow and steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed toward the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in zephyr; I was a flesh-flake, feather, bone.

  When I see this way I see truly. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses. I am the man who watched the baseball game in silence in an empty stadium. I see the game purely, abstracted and dazed. When it’s all over and the white-suited players lope off the green field to their shadowed dugouts, I leap to my feet and cheer.

  But I can’t go out and try to see this way. I’ll fail, I’ll go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod. The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. “Launch into the deep,” says Jacques Ellul, “and you shall see.”

  The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But while the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: Although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth Ailinon, alleluia! I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: You rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

  When European and American surgeons
learned to remove cataracts, many blind people could suddenly see. (Those blind from birth, however, could make no sense of their visual fields, saying they saw only “color patches.” They had never learned as babies to distinguish near objects from far ones.) Many refused to use this incomprehensible new sight of theirs. Others, who had known objects only by feel, began learning to see.

  A girl led into a garden “stands speechless in front of the tree, which she names ‘tree’ only by taking hold of it, and then as ‘the tree with the lights in it.’”

  It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day, walking along Tinker Creek, thinking of nothing at all, I saw it—the tree with the lights in it. It was the same backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost, only charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

  Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

  PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

  THE WATERS OF SEPARATION

  Fair weather cometh out of the north: with God is terrible majesty.

  —THE BOOK OF JOB, 37:22

  TODAY IS THE WINTER SOLSTICE. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready—for what?

  And today was fair, hot, even; I woke and my fingers were hot and dry to their own touch, like the skin of a stranger. I stood at the window, the bay window on which in summer a waxy-looking grasshopper had breathed puff puff, and thought, I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent, and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. “For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,” said Ruysbreck, “and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else.” But what is that word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note, but couldn’t catch the consonant that might shape it into sense. I wrenched myself from the window and stepped outside.

  Here by the mock-orange hedge was a bee, a honeybee, sprung from its hive by the odd heat. I had an idea. I had read recently that ancient Romans thought bees were killed by echoes. It seemed a far-fetched and pleasing nothing, that a spoken word or falling rock given back to its cliff—the airy nothing that nevertheless bears and spreads the uncomprehended impact of something—should stun these sturdy creatures right out of the air. I could put it to the test. It was as good an excuse for a walk as any; it might still the bell even, or temper it true.

  I knew where to find an echo; I’d have to take my chances on finding another December bee. I tied a sweater around my waist and headed for the quarry. It was hot; I never needed the sweater. A great tall cloud moved elegantly across an invisible walkway in the upper air, sliding on its flat foot like some great, proud snail. I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God, what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it. On the quarry path through the woods I saw a discarded aquarium. One side of its glass was shattered. I could plant a terrarium here, I thought; I could transfer the two square feet of forest floor under the glass to above the glass, framing it, hiding a penny, and saying to passersby: Look! Look! Here is two square feet of the world.

  I waited for an hour at the quarry, roving, my eyes filtering the air for flecks, until at last I discovered a bee. It was flying listlessly among dried weeds on the stony bank where I had sat months ago and watched a mosquito pierce the neck of a copperhead and suck. Beyond the bank lay the quarry pond, partly iced still, backed by stone cliffs. The setup was perfect:

  Hello!, I tried tentatively: Hello!, faltered the cliffs under the forest; and did the root tips quiver the rock? But that is no way to kill a creature, saying hello. Goodbye!, I shouted: Goodbye!, came back, and the bee drifted unconcerned among the weeds.

  It could be, I reasoned, that ancient Roman naturalists knew this fact that has escaped us because it works only in Latin. My Latin is sketchy. Habeas corpus! I cried; Deus absconditus! Veni! And the rock cliff batted it back: Veni! And the bee droned on.

  That was that. It was almost noon; the tall cloud was gone. I stood alone. I still seemed to hear the odd sound of my own voice honed to a quaver by rock, thrown back down my throat and cast dying around me, lorn. Could it have been heard at Hollins Pond? Was anybody there to hear? I felt again the bell resounding faint under my ribs. I’m coming, I thought, when I can. I quit the quarry, my spurt of exuberance drained, my spirit edgy and tight.

  The quarry path parallels Tinker Creek far upstream from my house, and when the woods broke into clearing and pasture, I followed the creek banks down. When I drew near the tear-shaped island, which I had never before approached from this side of the creek, a fence barred my way, a wire fence that wobbled across the creek and served me as a sagging bridge to the island. I stood, panting, breathing the frail scent of fresh water, felt the sun heat my hair.

  The December grass on the island was blanched and sere, pale against the dusty boles of sycamores, noisy underfoot. Behind me, the way I had come, rose the pasture belonging to Twilight, a horse of perpetually different color whose name was originally Midnight, and who one spring startled the neighborhood by becoming brown. Far before me Tinker Mountain glinted and pitched in the sunlight. The Lucas orchard spanned the middle distance, its wan peach limbs swept and poised just so, row upon row, like a stageful of thin, innocent dancers who will never be asked to perform. Below the orchard rolled the steers’ pasture, the creek, and the island where I’d watched a green frog sucked to its skin. Vaulting overhead was a fugitive, empty sky.

  Downstream at the island’s tip, where the giant water bug had held the living frog, I sat and sucked at my own dry knuckles. It was the way the frog’s eyes crumpled. His mouth was a gash of terror; the shining skin of his breast and shoulder shivered once and sagged, reduced to an empty purse. But, oh, those two snuffed eyes! They crinkled, the comprehension drained out of them, as if sense and life had been merely incidental to the idea of eyes—a filling like any jam in a jar that is easily emptied—and flattened, lightless and opaque. Did the giant water bug have the frog by the back parts, or by the hollow of the thigh? Would I eat a frog’s leg if offered? Sure.

  In Old Testament times, the priest sacrificed a ram as thanksgiving. Then he butchered it and waved the breast meat (“the wave breast”) and heaved the shoulder meat (“the heave shoulder”) at the altar of the Lord. What I want to know is this: Does the priest heave it at the Lord?

  Does he throw the shoulder of the ram of consecration—a ram that, before the priest slayed and chunked it, had been perfect and whole, not “Blind, or broken, or maimed, or having a wen, or scurvy, or scabbed . . . bruised, or crushed, or broken, or cut”—does he hurl it across the tabernacle, between the bloodied horns of the altar, hurl it at God? Now look at what you made me do. And then he eats it. This heave is a violent, desperate way of catching God’s eye. It is not inappropriate. We are people; we are permitted to have dealings with the creator and we must speak up for the creation. God, look at what you’ve done to this creature, look at the sorrow, the cruelty, the long damned waste! Can it be possible, can it ludicrously be for this that on this unconscious planet with my innocent kind I play softball all spring, to develop my throwing arm?

  How high, how far, could I heave a little
shred of frog shoulder at the Lord? How high, how far, how long until I die?

  I fingered the winter-killed grass, looping it round the tip of my finger like hair, ruffling its tips with my palms. Another year has twined away, unrolled and dropped across nowhere like a flung banner painted in gibberish. “The last act is bloody,” said Pascal, “however brave be all the rest of the play; at the end they throw a little earth upon your head, and it’s all over forever.” Somewhere, everywhere, there is a gap, like the shuddering chasm of Shadow Creek which gapes open at my feet, like a sudden split in the window or hull of a high-altitude jet, into which things slip, or are blown, out of sight, vanished in a rush, blasted, gone, and can no more be found. For the living there is rending loss at each opening of the eye, each Augenblick, as a muskrat dives, a heron takes alarm, a leaf floats spinning away. There is death in the pot for the living’s food, flyblown meat, muddy salt, and plucked herbs bitter as squill. If you can get it. How many people have prayed for their daily bread and famished? They die their daily death as utterly as did the frog, people, played with, dabbled upon, when God knows they loved their life. In a winter famine, desperate Algonquian Indians “ate broth made of smoke, snow, and buckskin, and the rash of pellagra appeared like tattooed flowers on their emaciated bodies—the roses of starvation,” in a French physician’s description, “and those who starved died covered with roses.” Is this beauty, these gratuitous roses, or a mere display of force?