Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Re-reading


    So, over 40 years ago, when we were just married, the first book my wife gave me to read was was Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - published just a few years before.

    I had grown up in the suburbs. My life was basketball on driveway courts, Star Trek on TV, boats and go-carts in the Summer, and college at a 5-year old brick campus. It’s not that I was necessarily shallow or self-referential - it was just the normal 1970s blinders.

    And then this book exploded on me. In fact, every sentence exploded on me; a sustained succession of sentences to take one’s breath away. It was what Dillard said and the rapture with which she said it. Explosion after explosion - and the new silences that she left me to fill. Every experience was one I had not had, although all were in my reach.

    I am reading it again - the same paperback; the pages dusty on the top and mushroom brown under the type. The sentences still explode. And I see how it has framed so much of how we decided to live, what we decided to value and what defends the core of me when I battle the encroaching doubts of retrospect.

    Annie Dillard’s 275 pages of epiphanies are about being open to the miraculous, to the particular, and to the present; that there is nourishment not only in knowledge, but in allowing ourselves to experience the world around us not just as a metaphor, but as worthy in its incremental journies as we are. The book is not a rationale to escape the banality or crises of our constructed culture, rather it is a call to recognize what was here first, what endures and might pass through us, and to not miss what is ours, if we only will.
***
(Among the humbling range of scientific and literary references she quotes along the way, this one by poet Michael Goldman is one of my favorites, "When the Muse comes She doesn't tell you what to write / She says get up for minute, I've something to show you, stand here.")

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