4
from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek eeln Annie Dillard r hen I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, '. I've never been seized by it since. For some reason I always :d"the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I ouldcradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a lpped-offpiece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk and, . g at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the nny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the ows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during this arrow drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passerby who Uldreceivein this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the uni- ·se.But I never lurked about, I would go straight homeand not e the matter another thought until, some months later, I would be lpped by the impulse to hide another penny. It is still the first week in January, and I've got great plans. I've "inthinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, Wrappedgifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and wn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But-and .~is the point-who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one ow.Jfyou crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous rip- .thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit ,dlingfrom its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, goyour rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so . .ourtshed and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. t ifyou cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding enny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact .ted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of .s.It is that simple. What you see is what you get. .used to be able to see flyinginsects in the air. I'd look ahead and .' not the row of hemlocks across the road, but the air in front of it. .eyeswould focus along that column of air, picking out flyinginsects. I lost interest, I guess, for I dropped the habit. NowI can see birds. ;, ,~-L l!alt~&t9JJlftfb~f!f What did Dillard do when she was a child? Connections: from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Seeing. 301

Seeing - Annie Dillard

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: Seeing - Annie Dillard

from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek•

eelnAnnie Dillard

r hen I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh,I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it forsomeone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly,

'. I've never been seized by it since. For some reason I always:d"the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. Iould cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by alpped-offpiece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk and,. g at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the

nny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled theows:SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, duringthis arrow drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passerby whoUldreceive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the uni-·se.But I never lurked about, I would go straight homeand note the matter another thought until, some months later, I would belpped by the impulse to hide another penny.It is still the first week in January, and I've got great plans. I've"inthinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see,Wrappedgifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded andwn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But-and.~is the point-who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow oneow.Jf you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous rip-.thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit,dlingfrom its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only,goyour rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so

. .ourtshed and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny.t if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that findingennywill literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact.ted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of.s. It is that simple. What you see is what you get..used to be able to see flying insects in the air. I'd look ahead and.' not the row of hemlocks across the road, but the air in front of it..eyeswould focus along that column of air, picking out flying insects.I lost interest, I guess, for I dropped the habit. Now I can see birds.

;,

,~-Ll!alt~&t9JJlftfb~f!fWhat did Dillard dowhen she was a child?

Connections: from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Seeing. 301

Page 2: Seeing - Annie Dillard

Probably some people can look at the grass at their feet and discoverall the crawling creatures. I would like to know grasses and sedges-and care. Then my least journey into the world would be a field trip,a series of happy recognitions. Thoreau, in an expansive mood, exult-ed, "What a rich book might be made about buds, including, perhaps,sprouts!" It would be nice to think so. I cherish mental images ofthree perfectly happy people. One collects stones. Another-van ..Englishman, say-ewatches clouds. The third lives on a coast andcollects drops of seawater, which he examines microscopically andmounts. But I don't see what the specialist sees, and so Icut myself off, not only from the total picture, but fromthe various forms of happiness.

Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it,now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in thewater, before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparent-ly ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fadesinto leaves: These disappearances stun me into stillnessand concentration; they say of nature that it concealswith a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that itis a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for myeyes only flings away her seven veils. For nature doesreveal as well as conceal: now you don't see it, now youdo. For a week last September, migrating red-winged black-birds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the back of thehouse. One day I went out to investigate the racket; I walked up toa tree, an Osage orange, and a hundred birds flew away. They simplymaterialized out of the tree. I saw a tree, then a whisk of color, then atree again. I walked closer, and another hundred blackbirds tookflight. Not a branch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparentlyweightless as well as invisible. Or it was as if the leaves of the Osageorange had been freed from a spell in the form of red-winged black-birds: they flew from the tree, caught my eye in the sky, and van-ished. When I looked again at the tree, the leaves had reassembled asif nothing had happened. Finally I walked directly to the trunk of thetree, and a final hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, andvanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeingthem? The Osage orange, unruffled, looked just as it had looked fromthe house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirds cried from itscrown. I looked downstream where they flew, and they were gone.Searching, I couldn't spot one. I wandered downstream to force themto play their hand, but they'd crossed the creek and scattered. Oneshow to a customer. These appearances catch at my throat; they arethe free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees.

It's all a matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one ofthose line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can youfind hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra,and a boot? Specialists can find the most incredibly well-hiddenthings. A book I read when I was young recommended an easy way to

Thematic ConnectionCompare Dillard'smessage of "seeing"with Bryant's "visibleforms" in the first twolines of "Thanatopsis."

302 • A Growing Nation (1800-1870)

I

Page 3: Seeing - Annie Dillard

find caterpillars to rear: you simply find some fresh caterpillar drop-pings, look up, and there's your caterpillar. Most recently an authoradvised me to set my mind at ease about those piles of cut sterns onthe ground in grassy fields. Field mice make them; they cut the grassdownby degrees to reach the seeds at the head. It seems that whenthe grass is tightly packed, as in a field of ripe grain, the blade won'ttopple at a single cut through the stem; instead the cut stem stmplydrops vertically, held in. the crush of grain. The mouse severs the bot-tom again and again, the stem keeps dropping an inch at a time, andfinally the head is low enough for the mouse to reach the seeds.Meanwhile, the mouse is positively littering the field with its littlepiles of cut stems, into which, presumably, the author of the book isconstantly stumbling.If I can't see these minutiae, I I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm

always on the lookout for ant lion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupaenear milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things areutterly cornmon, and I've not seen one. I bang on hollow trees nearwater, but so far no flying squirrels have appeared. In flat country Iwatch every sunset in hopes of seeing the green ray. The green ray isa seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurtingfountain at the moment of sunset; it throbs into the sky for twoseconds and disappears. One more reason to keep my eyes open.A photography professor at the University of Florida just hap-pened to see a bird die in midflight; it jerked, died, dropped,and smashed on the ground. I squint at the wind because I

read Stewart Edward White: "I have always maintained that ifyou looked closely enough you could see the wind-the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris fleeing high in the air." White was an excellentobserver, and devoted an entire chapter of The Mountains to the sub-ject of seeing deer: "As soon as you can forget the naturally obviousand construct an artificial obvious, then you too will see deer."But the artificial obvious is hard to see. My eyes account for less

than one percent of the weight of my head; I'm bony and dense; Iseewhat I expect. I once spent a full three minutes looking at a bull-frog that was so unexpectedly large I couldn't see it even though adozen enthusiastic campers were shouting directions.Finally I asked, 'What color am I looking for?" and a fellowsaid,

"Green."When at last I picked out the frog, I saw what painters are upagainst: the thing wasn't green at all, but the color of wet hickory bark.The lover can see, and the knowledgeable. I visited an aunt and

uncle at a quarter-horse ranch in Cody,Wyoming. I couldn't do muchof anything useful, but I could, I thought, draw. So as we all sat aroundthe kitchen table after supper, I produced a sheet of paper and drew ahorse. "That's one lame horse," my aunt volunteered. The rest of thefamilyjoined in: "Onlyplace to saddle that one is his neck"; "Looks likeWebetter shoot the poor thing, on account of those terrible growths."

1. minutiae (mi nOD"she I) n. small or relatively unimportant details.

Thematic ConnectionCompare Dillard'smessage about observingnature with John WesleyPowell's success indoing so.

.-L.W~~g91!19;;~Q~",-~~According to the author,how does one see nature?

Connections: from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Seeing. 303

Page 4: Seeing - Annie Dillard

I

Meekly, I slid the pencil and paper down the table. Everyone in thatfamily, including my three cousins, could draw a horse. Beautifully.When the paper came back, it looked as though five shining, realquarter horses had been corraled by mistake with a papier-machemoose; the real horses seemed to gaze at the monster with a steady,puzzled air. I stay away from horses now, but I can do a creditablegoldfish. The point is that I just don't know what the lover knows; ..Ijust can't see the artificial obvious that those in the know construct.The herpetologist-' asks the native, "Are there snakes in the ravine?""Nosir."And the herpetologist comes home with, yessir, three bagsfull. Are there butterflies on that mountain? Are the bluets in bloom,are there arrowheads here, or fossil shells in the shale?Peeping through my keyhole, I see within the range of only about

30 percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infraredand some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, butinvisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia," charged and firingwithout my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it formy brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions ofone-celled animals are not edited for the brain: "This is philosophical-ly interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only thesimplest animals perceive the universe as it is."A fog that won't burn away drifts and flows across my field of

vision. When you see fog move against a backdrop of deep pines,you see not the fog itself but streaks of clearness floating acrossthe air in dark shreds. So I see only tatters of clearness througha pervading obscurity. I can't distinguish the fog from the over-cast sky; I can't be sure if the light is direct or reflected.Everywhere darkness and the presence of the unseen appalls.We estimate now that only one atom dances alone in everycubic meter of intergalactic space. I blink and squint. What plan-et or power yanks Halley's Comet out of orbit? Wehaven't seenthat force yet; it's a question of distance, density, and the pallor ofreflected light. We rock, cradled in the swaddling band of darkness.Even the simple darkness of night whispers suggestions to the mind.

II"

I[

.. Anni~Dillard ,.:.-"-_ '" ~:\';'N _

(b. 1945)As a childin Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania,Annie Dillardloved reading,drawing, and

observing thenatural world.

She attended HollinsCollege in Roanoke,Virginia, and graduatedwith a B.A. and lateran M.A in English. Herexploration of a Virginiavalley during her years atHollins led to the publica-tionof Pilgrim at TinkerCreek (1974), whichwon the Pulitzer Prize forNonfiction in 1975. Sincethen, she has published tenother books" including thememoir An AmeriomChildhood (1987) and TheLiving (1992), a novel.

.-;.~..

2. herpetologist (htir' pe tar e jist) one who practices the study of reptiles and amphib-ians.

3. ganglia (gar]' gle e) masses of nerve cells that serve as centers from which nerveimpulses are transmitted.

r-~<F?77E-?=-~~;-~~~~~>;-:-- ....~~~:!..,,7"""c~~~:-':;-;- :;-_-~-=-",~--: ,':':;' ,---~.:'Fe -~,,-r~~"Z-;:- ---=----=~~~~=-----f-='-:;- :;~~"'S

I' ._... eOline.CUng(Aiter4tute fa~i.ailt:J. Pr~§ent~~_'-. .., -_ ,"- I -~~_'i • , =~ - 1 "", ~, _ ~ " -, - _,- -

I. What does Dillard see when she looks at nature?2. What enables some people to see things in nature that go

unnoticed by others? Name two poems in Part I in whichthe speakers share the appreciation of nature expressedin "Seeing." Explain your choices.

304 • A Growing Nation (1800-1870)