Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (27 page)
And the bell under my ribs rang a true note, a flourish as of blended horns, clarion, sweet, and making a long dim sense I will try at length to explain. Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. That breath never ceases to kindle, exuberant, abandoned; frayed splinters spatter in every direction and burgeon into flame. And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from space, the planet so startlingly painterly and hung, I will think, maple key. When I shake your hand or meet your eyes I will think, two maple keys. If I am a maple key falling, at least I can twirl.
Thomas Merton wrote, “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” 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. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock—more than a maple—a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon.
Spend
the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
I live in tranquillity and trembling. Sometimes I dream. I am interested in Alice mainly when she eats the cooky that makes her smaller. I would pare myself or be pared that I too might pass through the merest crack, a gap I know is there in the sky. I am looking just now for the cooky. Sometimes I open, pried
like a fruit. Or I am porous as old bone, or translucent, a tinted condensation of the air like a watercolor wash, and I gaze around me in bewilderment, fancying I cast no shadow. Sometimes I ride a bucking faith while one hand grips and the other flails the air, and like any daredevil I gouge with my heels for blood, for a wilder ride, for more.
There is not a guarantee in the world. Oh your
needs
are guaranteed, your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words: knock; seek; ask. But you must read the fine print. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” That’s the catch. If you can catch it will catch you up, aloft, up to any gap at all, and you’ll come back, for you will come back, transformed in a way you may not have bargained for—dribbling and crazed. The waters of separation, however lightly sprinkled, leave indelible stains. Did you think, before you were caught, that you needed, say, life? Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love? But no. Your needs are all met. But not as the world giveth. You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned that the outrageous guarantee holds. You see the creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you’re gone. You have finally understood that you’re dealing with a maniac.
I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eat
ing what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who sprang through the open window by my bed and pummeled my chest, barely sheathing his claws. I’ve been bloodied and mauled, wrung, dazzled, drawn. I taste salt on my lips in the early morning; I surprise my eyes in the mirror and they are ashes, or fiery sprouts, and I gape appalled, or full of breath. The planet whirls alone and dreaming. Power broods, spins, and lurches down. The planet and the power meet with a shock. They fuse and tumble, lightning, ground fire; they part, mute, submitting, and touch again with hiss and cry. The tree with the lights in it buzzes into flame and the cast-rock mountains ring.
Emerson saw it. “I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, ‘This must thou eat.’ And I ate the world.” All of it. All of it intricate, speckled, gnawed, fringed, and free. Israel’s priests offered the wave breast and the heave shoulder together, freely, in full knowledge, for thanksgiving. They waved, they heaved, and neither gesture was whole without the other, and both meant a wide-eyed and keen-eyed thanks. Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, said the bell. A sixteenth-century alchemist wrote of the philosopher’s stone, “One finds it in the open country, in the village and in the town. It is in everything which God created. Maids throw it on the street.
Children play with it.” The giant water bug ate the world. And like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says “Glory,” and my right foot says “Amen”: in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise.
In October, 1972, camping in Acadia National Park on the Maine
coast, I read a nature book. I had very much admired this writer’s previous book. The new book was tired. Everything in it was the dear old familiar this and the dear old familiar that. God save us from meditations. What on earth had happened to this man? Decades had happened, that was all. Exhaustedly, he wondered how fireflies made their light. I knew—at least I happened to know—that two enzymes called luciferin and luciferase combined to make the light. It seemed that if the writer did not know, he should have learned. Perhaps, I thought that night reading in the tent, I might write about the world before I got tired of it.
I had recently read Colette’s
Break of Day
, a book about her daily life that shocked young metaphysical me by its frivol
ity: lots of pretty meals and roguish conversations. Still, I read it all; its vivid foreignness intrigued me. Maybe my daily life would interest people by its foreignness, too. And was it at that time that I read Edwin Muir’s wonderful
Autobiography
and noticed how much stronger was the half he wrote when he was young?
A
New Yorker
essay that fall noted that mathematicians do good work while they are young because as they age they suffer “the failure of the nerve for excellence.” The phrase struck me, and I wrote it down. Nerve had never been a problem; excellence sounded novel.
How boldly committed to ideas we are in our twenties! Why not write some sort of nature book—say, a theodicy? In November, back in Virginia, I fooled around with the idea and started filling out five-by-seven index cards with notes from years of reading.
Running the story through a year’s seasons was conventional, so I resisted it, but since each of the dozen alternative structures I proposed injured, usually fatally, the already frail narrative, I was stuck with it. The book’s other, two-part structure interested me more. Neoplatonic Christianity described two routes to God: the
via positiva
and the
via negativa
. Philosophers on the
via positiva
assert that God is omnipotent, omniscient, etc; that God possesses all positive attributes. I found the
via negativa
more congenial. Its seasoned travelers (Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century and Pseudo-Dionysius in the sixth) stressed God’s unknowability. Anything we may say of God is untrue, as we can know only creaturely attributes, which do not apply to God. Thinkers on the
via negativa
jettisoned everything that was not God; they hoped that what was left would be only the divine dark.
The book’s first half, the
via positiva
, accumulates the
world’s goodness and God’s. After an introductory chapter, the book begins with “Seeing,” a chapter whose parts gave me so much trouble to put together I nearly abandoned the book and its attendant piles of outlines and cards. The
via positiva
culminates in “Intricacy.” A shamefully feeble “Flood” chapter washes all that away, and the second half of the book starts down the
via negativa
with “Fecundity,” the dark side of intricacy. This half culminates in “Northing” (it is, with the last, my favorite chapter), in which the visible world empties, leaf by leaf. “Northing” is the counterpart to “Seeing.” A concluding chapter keeps the bilateral symmetry.
As I finished each chapter, I collected those index cards with bits I liked but had not been able to use and filed them under later chapters. The more I wrote, the thicker the later files grew. When I reached “Northing” I thought, It’s now or never for these best bits, so—exultant, starved, delirious on caffeine—I threw them all in.
Later I regretted naming the chapters, nineteenth-century-style, because somebody called the book a collection of essays—which it is not. The misnomer stuck, and adhered to later books, too, only one of which,
Teaching a Stone to Talk
, was in fact a collection of (narrative) essays. Consequently I have the undeserved title of essayist.
Because a great many otherwise admirable men do not read books American women write, I wanted to use a decidedly male pseudonym. When
Harper’s
magazine took a chapter, and then
Atlantic Monthly
, I was so tickled I used my real name, and the jig was pretty much up. Still I intended to publish the book as A. Dillard, hoping—as we all hope, and hope in vain—someone might notice only the text, not considering its jacket, its picture, or the advertising; and not remembering someone else’s impression of the book, or its writer, or its other readers; and not know
ing the writer’s gender, or age, or nationality—just read the book, starting cold with the first sentence. Editors and agents talked me out of using “A. Dillard,” and talked me into allowing a dust-jacket picture. I regret both decisions. I acknowledge, however, that living in hiding would be cumbersome, and itself ostentatious.
It never entered my mind that publishing a book could be confusing. The publisher’s publicity director and I wrangled daily on the telephone, at full strength, in mutual mystification, her to urge, me to refuse, an unceasing cannonade of offers. Some were hilarious: Would I model clothes for
Vogue
? Would I write for Hollywood? The decision to avoid publicity, to duck a promotional tour, and especially not to appear on television—not on the
Today
show, not on any of innumerable network specials, not on my own (believe it or not) weekly show—saved my neck.
Later a reporter interviewed me over the phone. “You write so much about Eskimos in this book,” she said. “How come there are so many Eskimos?” I said that the spare arctic landscape suggested the soul’s emptying itself in readiness for the incursions of the divine. There was a pause. At last she said, “I don’t think my editor will go for that.”
How does
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
seem after twenty-five years? Above all, and salvifically, I hope, it seems bold. That it is overbold, and bold in metaphor, seems a merit. I dashed in without any fear of God; at twenty-seven I had all the license I thought I needed to engage the greatest subjects on earth. I dashed in without any fear of man. I thought that nine or ten monks might read it.
I’m afraid I suffered youth’s drawback, too: a love of grand sentences, and fancied a grand sentence was not quite done until
it was overdone. Some parts seem frivolous. Its willingness to say “I” and “me” embarrasses—but at least it used the first person as a point of view only, a hand-held camera directed outwards.
Inexplicably, this difficult book has often strayed into boarding-school and high-school curricula as well as required college courses, and so have some of its successors. Consequently, I suspect, many educated adults who would have enjoyed it, or at least understood it, never opened it—why read a book your kid is toting? And consequently a generation of youth has grown up cursing my name—which, you recall, I didn’t want to use in the first place.
—Annie Dillard, 1999
I was twenty-seven in 1972 when I began writing
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
. It is a young writer’s book in its excited eloquence and its metaphysical boldness. (Fools rush in.) Using the first person, I tried to be—in Emerson’s ever-ludicrous phrase—a transparent eyeball.
The Maytrees
shows how a writer’s craft matures into spareness: short sentences, few modifiers. The Maytrees are a woman and a man both simplified and enlarged. Everyone and everything represents itself alone. No need for microcosms or macrocosms. The Maytrees’ human tale needs only the telling. Writers’ styles often end pruned down. (I knew this happened; I did not know I was already that old.)
—2007