Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I will.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Chapter 15: The Waters of Separation
"For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see," said Ruysbroeck, "and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else." But what is that word? ... A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones...
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
"Pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones"--that's how you say "up and down my spine" in Dillard.
Chapter 14: Northing
One entomologist says that walking sticks, along with monarch butterflies, are able to feign death--although I don't know ho you could determine if a walking stick was feigning death or twigginess.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The word is funny--twigginess. The idea is funnier. That's what makes me laugh. Even in her poetic, meditative prose, Dillard can make me laugh, make me write "funny" and "cute" in the margins.
Chapter 13: The Horns of the Altar
"We are all of us clocks," says Eddington, "whose faces tell the passing years." The young man proudly names his scars for his lover; the old man alone before a mirror erases his scars with his eyes and sees himself whole.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Don't you just love Dillard? I had to read the last sentence twice to fully appreciate it. The imagery is solidary, lovely, and--my favorite word I learned from Dillard--eidetic. Because I see an old man. Because I see the young man through the old man's eyes. And I see myself, countless times before a mirror, erasing away my scars and tears weather-beaten by the passing years. Then you're perfect, aren't you, to yourself and no one else, in that unselfish self-consciousness.
Chapter 12: Nightwatch
A bobwhite who is still calling in summer is lorn; he has never found a mate. When I first read this piece of information, every bobwhite call I heard sounded tinged with desperation, suicidally miserable. But now I am somehow cheered on my way by that solitary signal. The bobwhite's very helplessness, his obstinate Johnny-two-notedness, takes on an aura of dogged pluck. God knows what he is thinking in those pendant silences between calls. God knows what I am. But: bobwhite.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
In the margin I had written, "a sad, scientific truth." But as I type Dillard here, I think again. Sadness is no longer; hope replaces sadness. I imagine a bobwhite singing, singing, singing for his love and when he is not, he is hoping, hoping, hoping. You still sing because of hope. Without it you would stop singing altogether. (And you'd be called bobblack or bobbrown or bobguacamole or some other bob-hopelessness.) But what extra breath and chance you're taking to sing-- with that "dogged pluck"!
Chapter 11: Stalking Part III
Rather, we know now for sure that there is no knowing. ... physicists are saying that they cannot study nature per se, but only their own investigation of nature.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Dillard's response to Werner Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy: "you cannot know both a particle's velocity and position." I've been looking for this idea for some time, trying to recall whose it was, for I only remembered what he said. (It's funny how one day a name came to me and that was Bohr.) But Heisenberg--when he was only twenty-six!