An Annie Dillard Reader

by Annie Dillard

  Robert Stone, like Tolstoy, usually keeps his prose plain, but it is a plain fact that it is sometimes a beautiful world. Here is how it was in an unnamed Central American country, coming into the finca landings at night:

  The boat would slow and ease toward the bank until the searching spotlight over the wheelhouse picked up the vehicle and the waiting men together with a thousand spinning moths, their bright wings flashing a thousand colors in the glare. Into this well of light, the Indian deckhands would toss the starboard hawsers…(A Flag for Sunrise)

  You know how a puppy, when you point off in one direction for him, looks at your hand. It is hard to train him not to. The modernist arts in this century have gone to a great deal of trouble to untrain us readers, to force us to look at the hand. Contemporary modernist fine prose says, Look at my hand. Plain prose says, Look over there. But these are matters of emphasis. So long as words refer, the literary arts will continue to do two things at once, just as all representational painting does two things at once. They point to the world with a hand. So long as you write literature, you cannot unhinge the world from the words, nor the words from the page.

  The very finest works of art do both things at once extremely well. Cézanne’s still lifes and landscapes, for instance, depict. They push the paint surface into a modified simulation of deep space; the meadow tilts back toward the mountain. At the same time they pull deep space up toward the surface of the picture plane; the mountain looms flat against the canvas. The paintings’ greatness depends on this spatial tension. Now look at Shakespeare. Who could say where the greater power of King Lear resides? Do we enter it as an emotional world of enlarged sympathies wherein we lose ourselves? Or do we admire it more as an artifice of theater and language?

  Finally, it is interesting to note Robbe-Grillet’s notion (which I think is accurate) that a writer thinks of a future novel first as “a way of writing.” The narrative, he says, “what will happen in the book[,] comes afterward, as though secreted by the style itself.” One does not “choose” a prose, or a handling of paint, as a fitting tool for a given task, the way one chooses a 5/16 wrench to open a 5/16 bolt. Rather—and rather creepily—the prose “secretes” the book. The book is a side effect of the prose, as our vision is a side effect of our seeing. Prose is a kind of cognitive tool, which secretes its objects—as though a set of tools were to create the very engines it could enter, as though a wielded wrench, like a waved soap-bubble wand, were to emit a trail of fitted bolts in its wake.

  1982

  THE LIVING

  SOMETIME IN THE MIDDLE OF a December night in 1892, in the town of Whatcom on the north coast of Washington State, a man called Clare lay asleep with his wife in their bed. He was a tall, thin man forty-two years old. He slept like a baby. He slept facing the window, facing west toward the water; his wife slept on her belly between him and the window. His sleep was a great falling, a free and confident drop into nowhere.

  At some time during that night, at some time before he woke for the day, the man’s two eyes opened. The eyes’ lids rose; the man’s head lifted an inch from the pillow. His eyes moved together as though they were pointing at the nest of wife’s hair on the mattress, or at the sea tide far beyond the window, swelling under the brightening sky. The man’s two eyes moved, but only reflexively. The head dropped; the man slept on.

  The Nooksack River was born of a drip in a cirque at the tongue of a glacier hung on a western rampart of Mount Shuksan. The drip froze into an icicle which dropped into a small pool; a runnel from the pool threaded a high valley out of the cirque and through the mountains, adding seep to melt and swelling so fast that a mile from its source a man needed one-piece rubber waders and a stout stick to cross it. This was the Nooksack River. It ducked into the forest, chuted between foothills, and fell asleep on the Nooksack plain.

  The plain spread from the foothills to Gooseberry Point, the Lummi Indian reservation that bounded Bellingham Bay. The plain spread smoothly, without shadow, because the river had rolled over and over in its sleep, or dreamily swished its heavy tail, and flattened everywhere the land. Emigrants who knew farming looked for river silt under the fir forest, and found it; it made a likely loam, lightened by sand. They cleared the woods with oxen to farm it, sold the logs, grazed cattle around the stumps, and planted peas.

  In this way the town of Whatcom had grown up in the 1880s, and continued to grow. The settlers built the town on the shore of Bellingham Bay, north of Puget Sound. The settlers hoped to have a share in greatness as the town’s fortunes rose; they hoped Whatcom would become the chief Pacific port. But the port aspect failed. Bellingham Bay was not a sheltered harbor, and it silted up. At low tide the mudflats extended out to the railroad trestle that crossed the bay. Still, the long wharf was good for fishing boats in season, and by and by a spur of the railroad came.

  I

  On that December night in 1892, Beal Obenchain stood in the mud of Bellingham Bay. He bounced on his big boot toes, stepped aside, and watched the saltwater mud fill his boot-toe dents. The tide was going out; it was a black neap tide that barely moistened the mudflats. From these mudflats, in the frequent depressions and panics that racked the Puget Sound towns, people scratched up inferior clams—horse clams, bent-nose and jack clams. The town’s children waded here in summer evenings’ high tides. It was the children who, the previous summer, found the top of the head of a “Hindoo” who jumped or was pushed from the Great Northern Railroad trestle that spanned the bay in a wide curve. Digging revealed that beneath the Hindoo’s head was the rest of him; his body stood buried upright in the mud. When things dropped from the trestle, they tended to accumulate on the mudflats, or wash up on the beach: so also did lost octopus traps, scuttled boats, and broken boom logs on a westerly.

  There was an old shark carcass on the beach; Obenchain had passed it on his way to the open flats. The carcass represented a shark that had once been eighteen feet long; the living creature fouled in a fisherman’s gill net and drowned. The fisherman had displayed the shark on the town wharf till the carcass exploded and stank; then he towed it out to sea and cut it loose. An autumn floodtide dragged it back shoreward and lodged it, disintegrating and crawling with crabs, against the trestle pilings. The crabs were yellow Dungeness crabs; they ate the flesh in their clattering fashion, by squatting over it and lowering what looked like arms from their mouths and passing bites directly into what looked like their stomachs. At last the fisherman had enclosed what was left of the shark in his ruined net and towed it south to the mudflat; he beached his boat on the flood tide and man-hauled the mess up the beach. There, on round stones under a sandstone cliff, the shark had solidified, barely bothered by shade-chilled flies. The sun and the freeze dried and blackened it; rain ran down it; the northerly wind turned it to stone.

  The fisherman’s net rotted at once and his manila line became a ridge of shreds, but the black shark carcass under the cliff ceased changing. It looked like a creosoted log, or a lava tube, or a vein of coal, or a sewer pipe. It was one of many obstructions on the upper beach that a man had to crawl over or walk wetly around. The others were all dead Douglas firs whose spiked trunks jutted out from the crumbled cliffside and pointed seaward like artillery.

  It was December. It was December all day and dark as the center of earth. Solid cloud pressed over the land and water like a granite slab. For three weeks, no one from the town had seen Mount Baker or any mountain in the east, or the moon overhead, or the sun. This morning the sun had in fact appeared fuzzily on the far side of a fog, but then the granite clouds had sealed the sky again. By noon, no one could see even the western islands. Walking on the mud below the beach, Beal Obenchain could barely make out the old wharf and its bent pilings, where nine months ago he had tied and drowned a Chinaman at low tide. He could barely make out the trestle behind the old wharf; he saw the dark bulge where the trestle flew out from the woods on the cliff, and the dark streak of its curved flight over the bay. A figure was moving a
long the trestle’s walkway, out to sea. It was raining a little, and stopping a little, as it did all winter, as if the sky were a cold cave ceiling that dripped.

  It was four-thirty, after sunset. The colorless light came from nowhere and dimmed, and the blue dark, like a purse seine, was drawing close. Obenchain stood in the center of an ever-decreasing circle. He chewed a salty strand of bull kelp and spat the bits on the mud. He could still see, halfway out of the bay where the current still ran, a dozen drenched cormorants, motionless in silhouette, which rode a tide-caught log, but he could no longer see the raft of black brant sucking eelgrass under the trestle. He could see humped eelgrass in the mud by the water, and he could see black pools and channels of standing water everywhere splitting the flats; the shining darkness of the water carved the dull darkness of the mud into lobes.

  A thought had taken deep root in his mind; absently, he removed his high-crowned derby and combed his hair over his temples. There were gaudy patches of oil film visible at his feet. Whenever something died beneath the surface, its decay released a film of iridescent oils, blue and yellow, on the mud. Near one of these oil slicks, Obenchain found a lady’s comb. Everywhere he walked he saw big wormholes in the mud. There were bloodworms under there, bloodworms as fragile as egg yolks. If a man touched one while he was digging, it broke and spilled cold blood into the hole. There were lugworms under there, too; they always stretched and never broke.

  Now Obenchain awoke from his thought and discovered his pants’ leg was soaked; a horse clam had squirted a load of water on him. He quit the mud then, and moved to the black eelgrass humps, where he trod on hidden skeleton shrimps, sea urchins, and snails. The rain picked up. The mudflat stank of cold live mud, fish parts, and fog. He was getting cold.

  Beal Obenchain was tall and stout, twenty-eight years old. His long head seemed to flow directly into his neck, for thick muscles covered a small jaw. He had come to the mudflat to think. He had killed a man near here last year, and was just deciding not to kill another. He and an itinerant Wyoming miner had killed an ugly Chinaman by lashing him to a piling under the old wharf one midnight; they left him to drown when the tide came in.

  They had knifed a purple starfish, which was in the way, and pried it from the old wharf piling in sections. They stripped the struggling Chinaman, who had, so far as they could make out, a particular dread of the big crabs that would roll in with the water. Obenchain himself had become weepy, and recited a psalm from his childhood. They gagged the man and bound his wrists and lashed him to the piling with a rolling hitch. The Wyoming miner said, “I’ve had enough,” and walked off to the north. Obenchain glanced after the miner and let him go.

  As a final gesture, on the mudflat halfway between the Chinaman and the low-tide water, Obenchain had left a lighted lantern, so the Chinaman could study the tide for the first three hours as it rose, until it tipped the lantern and washed it out. After that, he would perforce imagine the water until it touched his feet. Then he could feel the water, and measure its rise against his skin. Obenchain departed, and no one from the town saw anything.

  The least singular aspect of the Chinaman’s death for Obenchain was its possible consequence on the temporal plane. Obenchain knew that he was not afraid of the town. He was an intellectual, and the townspeople were laborers or sharpers. They were laborers or sharpers with pretensions, who never left the life of sensation but only refined its objects: when they had a little land, or a ten-year-old name, they switched in their boots from beer to sherry, and got them a Lummi Indian man to cut their wood. Respectable people were those who avoided outcry. Obenchain was more than respectable; he was a natural aristocrat, self-made, whose high skull scraped the sky.

  He was a stranded mystic, an embodiment of reason’s directing will, who alone understood the Chinaman’s luck in sacrificing his body for this experiment on his mind. Above all, Obenchain knew himself to be a man of science, a man who had access to metagnostical structures, a man of methods conceived in purity, who knew secrets.

  It was by the simplest, most worldly wisdom, too, that he knew that if the powers that be were to deny him their forces, and people tried to trap him, he could always use his mastery of the powers that are. If the sluggish and greedy laborers of the town should stir against him, he was smart enough to keep the sheriff flattered by losing at chess—and if that failed, he was loose enough to move.

  Obenchain had no ties on earth. He had rowed into Whatcom from one of the outer islands when he was fourteen; he rowed up and down the tides for two days and a night. He sold his boat to a childless couple he found back of the beach, who boarded him free while he went to school. He held the fawning couple in contempt; he read Byron in the shed. When he was sixteen he built himself a room in a hollow cedar stump near the railroad right-of-way in the woods south of town. He lived there still, in the cedar stump near the tracks. He raided fishtraps for cash, or worked clearing trees; he adopted, fed, and petted mice; paid no taxes; he rolled blanket stiffs he found alone by the tracks. Bored, he invented games with dice and with cards; he bet on bad weather; he whistled; he made a spectacle of himself near the tracks when the passenger coach passed. He sent for translations of recent books from France. He baked bread, cinnamon rolls, and pies. He had killed a man near here last spring, and had just decided not to kill another.

  Obenchain could no longer make out the high trestle, or the dull waterline. He recrossed the mudflat in a drenching dark and gained the beach, where stones ground loudly underfoot. Obenchain thought he needed to walk in order to think, or in order to quiet his thoughts. He had not thought well on the mudflat, but he had not been wholly bored. His own actions often surprised him; his feelings and deeds overtook him like seizures, like storms of inspiration. Now he knew what he would do.

  The man he resolved not to kill was Clare Fishburn, who taught domestic arts in the high school shop. Obenchain had drawn his name that day from a bucket of names, still uncertain then whether he would go through with it. The way in which he had now decided not to kill Clare Fishburn was by threatening to kill him and doing nothing. He would let his victim live as best he could in the knowledge that he was at any moment to die.

  You simply tell a man, any man, that you are going to kill him. Then—assuming he believes you enough to watch his every step but not quite enough to run away or kill you first—then you take pains not to kill him and instead watch what he does, stuck alive on your bayonet and flailing. Killing the Chinaman had afforded less interest and spectacle than Obenchain hoped it would. When you kill a man directly, on no matter how gradual a tide, you do not, he discovered, actually take his life. You merely end his life; you do not take it. His life force is not added to yours, nor do his guardian spirits flock to you; these forces perish, and nobody profits by them. You take as yours, bluntly, only his carcass if you want it, which is of no value or intrigue to any save to hungry crabs and his wife.

  If, however, you make a man believe that you will arrange for his dying at any moment, then you can, in effect, possess his life. He enters the circumference of your personal power. It was as easy as eating striped candy. For how could that man perform the least or the greatest act with his whole heart? You would give him, like bondsmen, self-consciousness and uncertainty, and they would deliver him unto you where you sat. How could such a man eat a plate of food or lie with his wife or take two steps in a row without thinking the very thoughts you bade him think? You would own this man—he would own Clare Fishburn—without lifting a finger. His every action and thought would be in some sense under your control. You would pipe and he would dance.

  Obenchain followed the beach south. His eye sought the line of forest on the headland, but its black silhouette was lost in the black sky, as if the sky had abolished it. Life is mind, Obenchain thought, and mind in some unguessable way operates in words. In his very breath was power. You tell a man his life is in your hands, and, miraculously, his life is in your hands. You own him insofar as he believes you
. You own him as God owns a man, to the degree of his faith.

  There was no light, human or inhuman, up or down the beach, or out on the invisible islands, or up in the forest, or anywhere on earth or in heaven, except a chill and fantastical sheen on the unstable dark of the sea. What, Obenchain speculated, would become of this man’s former, heedless life? To what category of being belongs a dead life whose body lives on? Obenchain had known Clare Fishburn four years ago, in the high school shop. Professor Fishburn, as people called him, directed the high school manual-training course. At that time he had a wife who was expecting, a dead-end job, a house on a hill, and a head full of nothing. Should someone hold a funeral for this dead life? Clare’s body would live long after Clare’s real life was over. This was the dead opposite of murder; it was birth, or conception. Obenchain thought—and sentimental tears rose in his eyes—that in many long years, when the body called Clare Fishburn should die of natural causes, he, Obenchain, would attend the funeral apparently as a townsman but in fact as the father of a dead only son.

  He would call on Clare Fishburn after supper. Now he was bound for his house in the forest—the roofed-over hollow cedar stump. He could light a bucketful of folded papers in the stove, fire up some wet alder, and dry his trousers.