It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The lights of the fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. Dillard then talks of walking in the woods, “thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. One girl, upon seeing a tree for the first time, called it “the tree with lights on it”, as that’s what colors were to her: vividly aglow. She goes on to talk about the era when doctors discovered how to remove cataracts-describing the experience of blind people who could suddenly see, and how they attempted to describe what was in front of them. Hone and spread your spirit until you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.” The secret of seeing is to set sail on solar wind. In her essay titled “Seeing”, she writes: “I cannot cause light the most I can do is put myself in the path of its beam. But the stars themselves neither require nor demand it.” If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. How could you not fall in love with a book that says this to you: “You do not have to sit outside in the dark. Twenty minutes later I found myself deep in one essay, reading and re-reading the final page, captivated by the imagery and sentiment. I abandoned my Silver Palate quest (pasta puttanesca and lemon chicken be damned!) and sat down to flip through the pages. I picked it up and flipped it over to see that it was The Abundance by Annie Dillard-a collection of essays that I bought at the secondhand library shop for 25 cents and never opened. My hands fell upon a thick white book with a comfortable heft. Oh well! It’s good to have a task! Time to bust out the power tools.) (Just between us, I was actually searching for The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook while also contemplating the sheer idiocy of filling my entire living room wall with unsecured glass-and-metal shelving piled with heavy books when I have a chubby baby juuust on the brink of crawling. The other day I was standing in front of the bookshelf, running my fingers over the colorful spines. It also gave me the gift of one of my favorite lines in any book, ever: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” It reached the part of me that loves land and space and the physical world, and it used that comfortable terrain to lead me into new territory. In the case of her book, it showed me incredible writing and how to translate something wild and beautiful into words. But I can still understand why it moved me so-not unlike many formative experiences around that age, it was the newness of it, the way it simultaneously cracked open my world to become wider and spoke to something deeply familiar within me. I’ve since reread pieces of it and it surprises me how intense it is: violent and brash and deeply spiritual in a way that almost feels dark. One of the books that really affected me in high school was Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
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