Chapter 8: Intricacy

I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This happens to me, particularly when it's one of those happier, luckier dreams--I don't want to wake up, but I am, either almost or already. So I just lay there with eyes shut and try to beckon that lovely dream. Let nothing wake me. Don't find me. But I'm losing my dream. I can't see him anymore. Come back. Please? Come back inside my eyes. I'm awake. Oh, dear. When I close my eyes again, he's not there. I am found, but I lost him. 

The rest of the day I walk around this world looking for him. 

Gravity, to Copernicus, is the nostalgia of things to become spheres.

Arthur Koestler

Meditation on Seeing / Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty wrote a review on Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Here, click and read it. Published March 24, 1974. Just after the arrival of Pilgrim.

Chapter 6: The Present Part II, Revisited

Oh, but what about that heave in the wrist when I saw the tree with the lights in it, and my heart ceased, but I am still there?

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Mrs. Bell let me see the tree with the lights in it. That was three years ago. Do you think I can see it again--come across that breathing picture? 

Chapter 6: The Present Part II

Thomas Merton wrote, in a light passage in one of his Gethsemane journals: "Suggested emendation in the Lord's Prayer: Take out 'Thy Kingdom come' and substitute 'Give us time!'" But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Yes--what we have and lack, at the same time, is time. And in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, Valentine and Septimus, each at different times, are talking about time, at the same time!