Annie Dillard | scillagrace

I’ve always believed that I have a great capacity for fascination…until a few days ago when I began to read Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood. She has it in spades, and has always had it, in a way that makes me feel distracted and dull by comparison. Here’s an excerpt from that memoir:

“Our parents and grandparents, and all their friends, seemed insensible to their own prominent defect, their limp, coarse skin.

“We children had, for instance, proper hands; our fluid, pliant fingers joined their skin. Adults had misshapen, knuckly hands loose in their skin like bones in bags; it was a wonder they could open jars. There were loose in their skins all over, except at the wrists and ankles, like rabbits.

“We were whole, we were pleasing to ourselves. Our crystalline eyes shone from firm, smooth sockets; we spoke in pure, piping voices through dark, tidy lips. Adults were coming apart, but they neither noticed nor minded. My revulsion was rude, so I hid it. Besides, we could never rise to the absolute figural splendor they alone could on occasion achieve. Our beauty was a mere absence of decrepitude; their beauty, when they had it, was not passive but earned; it was grandeur; it was a party to power, and to artifice, even, and to knowledge. Our beauty was, in the long run, merely elfin. We could not, finally, discount the fact that in some sense they owned us, and they owned the world.

“Mother let me play with one of her hands. She laid it flat on a living-room end table beside her chair. I picked up a transverse pinch of skin over the knuckle of her index finger and let it drop. The pinch didn’t snap back; it lay dead across her knuckle in a yellowish ridge. I poked it; it slid over intact. I left it there as an experiment and shifted to another finger. Mother was reading Time magazine.

“Carefully, lifting it by the tip, I raised her middle finger an inch and released it. It snapped back to the tabletop. Her insides, at least, were alive. I tried all the fingers. They all worked. Some I could lift higher that others.

“That’s getting boring.” “Sorry, Mama.”

“I refashioned the ridge on her index-finger knuckle; I made the ridge as long as I could, using both my hands. Moving quickly, I made parallel ridges on her other fingers — a real mountain chain, the Alleghenies; Indians crept along just below the ridgetops, eyeing the frozen lakes below them through the trees.”

What rare child in this century, surrounded by electronic stimulators of all descriptions, would spend a half an hour fascinated by her mother’s hand, I wonder? I had the chance to meet 56 kindergarteners at the Wehr Nature Center this morning. This is what we brought out to fascinate them:

Boxy

Now that’s an ancient face I could stare at for hours! Meet Boxy, the ornate box turtle. Her species is found primarily in southwestern Wisconsin, where there are sandy prairies and is currently endangered and protected. She came to the nature center about 25 years ago; she may be about 10 years older than that. How do I know to call Boxy ‘she’? Brown eyes. Male box turtles have red eyes. Also, Boxy laid some eggs a few years after she came to the center (not that she had been with a male while she was there). Occasionally, Boxy has her beak trimmed. It can get overgrown because she’s not in the wild digging and wearing it down. I wonder if the vet has ‘styled’ her expression…she looks sad to me. She was quite chipper this morning, though. It’s noticeably warm for this time of year. She and the other reptiles were moving rapidly and eagerly in their cages. We put Boxy down in the middle of the circle of children, and she set out at a brisk pace to examine the perimeter, craning her neck up at the faces around her. She is a bit of a celebrity, as she meets about 10,000 kids every year. She may live to be as many as 70 years old. I wonder if the Nature Center will still be around or if she’ll live out her last days somewhere else.

Boxy has her own beauty, her own fascinating skin. ” The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood….Standing on the bare ground, –my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God…I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

What uncontained and immortal beauty will you discover to love today?

I hate hormones. Why anyone would want to replace estrogen once she’s finally lost it is beyond me. The moods and emotions it produces are so murky.

I feel like I haven’t learned a damn thing about who I am, and I’m almost 50 years old. Aren’t I supposed to get this right, eventually?

Annie Dillard writes about awakening to her consciousness when she was about 10 years old. How do you do that at ten? And remember what it felt like decades later? The woman must have a brain six times the size of mine. Here’s a passage I read this morning, from An American Childhood:

“I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.

“Consciousness converges with the child as a landing tern touches the outspread feet of its shadow on the sand: precisely, toe hits toe. The tern folds its wings to sit; its shadow dips and spreads over the sand to meet and cup its breast.

“Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.”

Why do I feel like I never achieved this perfect fit, this awakened consciousness, not as a child and that I’m struggling to find it still? The idea of ancient grace that began this blog seems as ethereal and unattainable as ever. The clumsy truce I’ve maintained with myself wears thin.

Time to cocoon under the blankets and let the snow fall. Perhaps I’ll emerge as from a chrysalis and feel differently by supper.