Chapter 11: Stalking

I found out the hard way that waiting is better than pursuing.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In stalking, that is. Otherwise, I would pursue first and wait later. But what do you stalk? Whom do you stalk? Dillard stalks muskrats. I stalk Dillard. 

Chapter 10: Fecundity

A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

And Dillard calls it a contract: "if you want to live, you have to die." F=ma. The iterated algorithm. The last waltz of Stoppard's Arcadia. 

Chapter 9: Flood

I expect to see anything at all.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In Chapter 2: Seeing Dillard writes, "I see what I expect." Now she is seeing more, being seen less. She has mastered the art of sight. 

Chapter 8: Intricacy, revisited

If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Why haven't AP biology and AP chemistry taught me this? I learn from Dillard in so many other dimensions. I drew five stars and wrote "Love Love Love!!!" in the margins. Here is the middle ground I've been looking for--between literature and science.

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! 

Chapter 6: The Present Part I

This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. ... as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This vaguely certain kind of recognition to an almost forgotten lover. There is a delight and there is a sadness. The present will always slip away. But the memories will not. You can hold on to them, at least, for as long as time allows you to. 

Consciousness itself does not hinder living in the present. Self-consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the present. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people--the novelist's world, not the poet's. ... Innocence is a better world. What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. 

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 

As an afterthought I add this in. It's so me, the glimpse I cast myself on a storefront window, how we are constantly turning around to see if we're being seen. But what does it matter--as long as you're living in the present and at that moment? You're true then. 

Chapter 5: Untying the Knot

Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky. Of course we have no idea which arc on the loop is our time, let alone where the loop itself is, so to speak, or down whose lofty flight of stairs the Slinky so uncannily walks.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In a five-page chapter I found this paragraph about time. 

The thing is: I can't seem to add anything more than what Dillard has already put down. My ideas and thoughts seem meaningless next to hers. 

It's winter break. I should keep writing. I should write like I've never done before, for I have all the time in the world now that I'm committed to this lovely college called Dartmouth and this lovely town called Hanover. What keeps me from writing more? I had thought I abandoned the fear of being wrong a long time ago. I should just keep writing nevertheless. 

Chapter 4: The Fixed

It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of its mindlessness. ... It is motion without direction, force without power... that our every arabesque and grande jete is a frantic variation on our one free fall.

The world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Can she illume me more than she already has? 

Chapter 3: Winter

It was like dying, this watching the world recede into deeper and deeper blues while the snow piled; silence swelled and extended, distance dissolved, and soon only concentration at the largest shadows let me make out the movement of falling snow, and that too failed.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This sentence becomes lovelier as I reread it. The tremendous and yet subtle beauty outweighs the initial sense of wonder, that mild feeling of confusion because the words are simply too gorgeous to take it all in at once. I like that Dillard compares her experience of watching a "curious nightfall" to dying and not death. Because they are two very different matters. It's like love and loving; there is a fine line between the two sets of truth. The gerund, then, is more profound than its original word. 

Chapter 2: Seeing

"As soon as you forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificial obvious, then you too will see deer."

Stewart Edward White

The lover can see, and the knowledgeable. ... The point is that I just don't know what the lover knows; I just can't see the artificial obvious that those in the know construct.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

What do you see in the one you love? You must love and know that person quite well because Emily asked me this. I told her I see his center in him. 

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Decided to read Annie Dillard in the morning, one chapter at a time, as my two-week project. I always wanted to read her. Mrs. Bell photocopied a chapter entitled "Seeing" for us in Fresh English and I absolutely loved it. So for my birthday I bought the book with the gift card I received, and after some months of having it sit on my shelf, I'm finally perusing it!

"Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block."

Annie Dillard 

Arcadia poster

Hannah – An absolutely superb job on your Arcadia  poster.  The fact that it’s two-sided only adds to its impressiveness – the title side is evocative, visually striking, and aesthetically perfect – I love the dropped red “A” even if I’m unsure of its (possibly many) significances.  Simply beautiful!

A+

Email from Mr. Freeman, December 9, 2010

It is not your defeat to be wrong; it is wrong to be self-defeatist.

Me, yesterday while brushing my teeth

It pains me to know that my friend is in pain. How do you deal with sadness--when something terrible has happened to her and just knowing that makes you feel terrible? Ann Patchett must have dealt with this all the time. With Lucy. I've become so careful for her that I don't quite know what to do. To be there, to still love her and care for her and understand her. To pray for her.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

Vladimir Nabokov

Just like William Carlos Williams!