My mother is just a year younger than Annie Dillard, so I kept thinking of her as I read this memoir. Their places in time might have been the same, but their circumstances could not have been more different: While Dillard was raised with privilege in the big industrial city of Pittsburgh, complete with private schools and lake homes and country clubs and wearing white gloves to the right Presbyterian church, my mother was raised in relative poverty in an Irish Catholic family in Charlottetown, PEI. In essence, though, they were very similar-- tomboys whose parents indulged them on the one hand while expecting them to conform to society's expectations on the other, and more importantly, they were both curious little girls who haunted their local libraries to find the answers to the questions that most fascinated them. My mother was recently telling the story about being in school as a young girl and repeatedly asking the nun who taught her why an omniscient and omnipotent God would allow people to be born who were destined to suffer, or worse, who were destined for eternal damnation. Unable to answer the question, and flustered in front of the class, the nun sent my mother out to stand in the hall. When Annie Dillard had these same questions as a teenager, she wrote a fierce letter to her minister, quitting the church. In a follow-up meeting with the assistant minister, she was offered some books that might address her questions. The best answer she found was in C.S. Lewis, who said, "Forget it". As Dillard summarises: The sum of human suffering we needn't worry about: There is plenty of suffering, but no one suffers the sum of it. I wonder what my mother would make of An American Childhood?
I recently listened to The Writing Life and was fascinated as Dillard described her writing studio, complete with a collection of stones and bones that she worries in her hands like talismans when daydreaming on her cot. The studio also contains paints and sketchbooks, along with various reference materials. How interesting, then, it is to see that these materials have always been with her; that from childhood she has been endeavoring to merge scientific inquiry with artistic expression.
An American Childhood is about awakening in childhood, about realising that the world is something outside yourself that you must find your place in.
Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.
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.
This idea is restated many ways throughout the book, in language gorgeous and poetic. By contrast and by coincidence, I am also listening to The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson right now. He is six years younger than Annie Dillard, and although he's from a less privileged background in Des Moines, Iowa, he writes of his own childhood, with great humour, about many of the same experiences: Polio scares; the atomic age; long drives in big, American cars; baseball and local variants; and most of all, enjoying the spoils of being a child during a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity.
This book does not describe my own childhood-- I don't think I ever had this burning curiosity, I certainly don't remember the transition from self-absorbed to self-aware. Was it because I watched too much TV instead of making explorations that would lead me to the loose threads that lead to larger inquiries? I came to these threads later in life-- am I poorer for it? I don't know. Lately, whenever my older daughter asks me if I know something or other, her computer geek boyfriend will chirp up, "Did you google it? You just need to google it." So far as it goes, he's right-- anyone can find the answer to anything if theygoogle it, but does that lead to wisdom? If you use google to find a definition for a word, you're not going to accidentally discover other words as you would when flipping through a physical dictionary. Is the availability of unlimited knowledge at one's fingertips the assassin of curiosity? Will my daughters find the threads?
Related to this: Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked around in books, like Lake Erie's rim as you climbed its cliffs. And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another. Knowledge wasn't a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being -- whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars.
On self-awareness: Knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you, rear, kick, and try to throw you; you hang on to the ring. It is riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping. Or, conversely, you step aside from the dreaming fast loud routine and feel time as stillness about you, and hear the silent air asking in so thin a voice, Have you noticed yet that you will die? Do you remember, remember, remember? Then you feel your life as a weekend, a weekend you cannot extend, a weekend in the country.
A bit related to my musings on Joan Didion's apparent need to hold on to mementos and experiences when reviewing Blue Nights : Some days I felt an urgent responsibility to each change of light outside the sunporch windows. Who would remember any of it, any of this our time, and the wind thrashing the buckeye limbs outside? Somebody had to do it, somebody had to hang on to the days with teeth and fists, or the whole show had been in vain. That it was impossible never entered my reckoning. For work, for a task, I had never heard the word.
On her headmistress recommending a college that would "smooth off her rough edges": I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?
On rock-collecting: Nothing was as it seemed. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother's not dead, dear -- she's only sleeping. Pry open the thin lid and find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed and sidereal beauty. Crystals grew inside rocks like arithmetical flowers. They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute that even the stones -- maybe only the stones --understood. Like prying open the thin lid of chaotic, individual experience and exposing the order and universality within? The connections between Dillard's youthful scientific enquiry and later artistry are made clear.
On a final note, how wonderful are Annie Dillard's parents? The wise-cracking, prank-pulling mother and Dixieland-loving, Huck Finn wannabe father, that "houseful of comedians", may have been the greatest treasures in that privileged home.
