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experienced those same moments more purely than I did, but he
brought fewer instruments to bear on the same material, he had
no data for comparison, and he profited only in the grossest of
ways, by having an assortment of itches scratched.
Self-consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the
present. It is the one instrument that unplugs all the rest. So long
as I lose myself in a tree, say, I can scent its leafy breath or estimate
its board feet of lumber, I can draw its fruits or boil tea on its
branches, and the tree stays tree. But the second I become aware
of myself at any of these activities looking over my own
shoulder, as it were the tree vanishes, uprooted from the spot
and flung out of sight as if it had never grown. And time, which
had flowed down into the tree bearing new revelations like
floating leaves at every moment, ceases. It dams, stills, stagnates.
Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistic-
ation implies. 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. I ve lived there. I
remember what the city has to offer: human companionship,
major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like
a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember
how
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 83
you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think,
next year& I ll start living; next year& I ll start my life. Inno-
cence is a better world.
Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough, and
time. Innocence is not the prerogative of infants and puppies,
and far less of mountains and fixed stars, which have no prerog-
atives at all. It is not lost to us; the world is a better place than
that. Like any other of the spirit s good gifts, it is there if you want
it, free for the asking, as has been stressed by stronger words than
mine. It is possible to pursue innocence as hounds pursue hares:
singlemindedly, driven by a kind of love, crashing over creeks,
keening and lost in fields and forests, circling, vaulting over
hedges and hills wide-eyed, giving loud tongue all unawares to
the deepest, most incomprehensible longing, a root-flame in the
heart, and that warbling chorus resounding back from the
mountains, hurling itself from ridge to ridge over the valley, now
faint, now clear, ringing the air through which the hounds tear,
open-mouthed, the echoes of their own wails dimly knocking in
their lungs.
What I call innocence is the spirit s unself-conscious state at
any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a recept-
iveness and total concentration. One needn t be, shouldn t be,
reduced to a puppy. If you wish to tell me that the city offers
galleries, I ll pour you a drink and enjoy your company while it
lasts; but I ll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at
the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed,
born, before that one particular canvas, that river, up to my neck,
gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the
vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled
away. These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely
as we can, in the present.
84 / Annie Dillard
The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move
through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and
what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color
patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated.
Living is moving; time is a live creek bearing changing lights. As
I move, or as the world moves around me, the fullness of what I
see shatters. This second of shattering is an augenblick, a particular
configuration, a slant of light shot in the open eye. Goethe s Faust
risks all if he should cry to the moment, the augenblick, Verweile
doch! Last forever! Who hasn t prayed that prayer? But the
augenblick isn t going to verweile. You were lucky to get it in the
first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is con-
stantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without
saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless.
I like the slants of light; I m a collector. That s a good one, I say,
that bit of bank there, the snakeskin and the aquarium, that patch
of light from the creek on bark. Sometimes I spread my fingers
into a viewfinder; more often I peek through a tiny square or
rectangle a frame of shadow formed by the tips of index fingers
and thumbs held directly before my eye. Speaking of the devel-
opment of papier collé in late Cubism, Picasso said, We tried to
get rid of trompe-l oeil to find a trompe-l esprit. Trompe-l esprit!
I don t know why the world didn t latch on to the phrase. Our
whole life is a stroll or a forced march through a gallery hung
in trompes-l esprit.
Once I visited a great university and wandered, a stranger, into
the subterranean halls of its famous biology department. I saw a
sign on a door: ichthyology department. The door was open a
crack, and as I walked past I glanced in. I saw just a flash. There
were two white-coated men seated opposite each other on high
lab stools at a hard-surfaced table. They bent over identical white
enamel trays. On one side, one man, with a lancet, was just
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 85
cutting into an enormous preserved fish he d taken from a jar.
On the other side, the other man, with a silver spoon, was eating
a grapefruit. I laughed all the way back to Virginia.
Michael Goldman wrote in a poem, When the Muse comes
She doesn t tell you to write; / She says get up for a minute, I ve
something to show you, stand here. What made me look up at
that roadside tree?
The road to Grundy, Virginia, is, as you might expect, a narrow
scrawl scribbled all over the most improbably peaked and
hunched mountains you ever saw. The few people who live along
the road also seem peaked and hunched. But what on earth ?
It was hot, sunny summer. The road was just bending off sharply
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