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    "parsed_content": "Meditation on Seeing\n \n \n \nReport a problemHide header\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n March 24, 1974\n Meditation on Seeing\n By EUDORA WELTY\n \n \n \n \n \n \n PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK\n By Annie Dillard.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n am no scientist,'' says Annie Dillard, ''but a poet and a walker with a background in theology and a penchant for quirky\n facts.'' In ''Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'' she offers ''what Thoreau called 'a meteorological journal of the mind.'''\n \n The book is a form of meditation, written with a headlong urgency, about seeing. A blind child the author happened to read about saw for the first time after cataracts had been removed from her eyes. ''When her doctor\n took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw 'the tree with lights in it.''' Annie Dillard had found the central metaphor for her book; it is the vision, the spiritual conception,\n that she will spend her days in solitude tramping the Roanoke creek banks and the Blue Ridge mountainside in search of herself.\n \n A reader's heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled. It is this intensity of experience that she seems to live in order to declare.\n \n There is an ambition about her book that I like, one that is deeper than the ambition to declare wonder aloud. It is the ambition to feel. This is a guess. But if this is what she has at heart, I am not quite sure that in writing this book she wholly\n accomplished it. I don't say this, though, to detract from her declared intention in laying herself open to the experience of seeing. It is a state she equates with innocence: ''What I call innocence is the spirit's\n unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.''\n \n But apparently it is an unself-consciousness that can be consciously achieved and consciously declared. And part of her conception of seeing is that in the act of doing it she is herself, in turn, being seen.\n \n \n ''I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell. I am an explorer, then, and I am also\n a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood.''\n \n What happens to that paragraph is what happens to her book. As the episodes begin, we can imagine an appealing young woman standing alert in a meadow, dressed in shirt and pants, holding her field glasses and provided with a sandwich: she is waiting to\n see, being very patient and still. By the chapter's end, we realize or suspect we are watching a dervish dancing. Receptivity so high-strung and high-minded has phases of its own. The author show us that it has its dark side too.\n \n ''The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or\n Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. This is what we know. The rest is gravy.''\n \n I honestly do not know what she is talking about at such times. The only thing I could swear to is that the writing here leaves something to be desired. ''What's going on here?'' is one of the author's refrains. ''The\n creator loves pizzazz,'' she answers herself.\n \n She is better at stalking a muskrat: ''Stalking is a pure form of skill, like pitching or playing chess. Rarely is luck involved. I do it right or I do it wrong; the muskrat will tell me, and that right early. Even more than baseball, stalking\n is a game played in the actual present. At every second, the muskrat comes, or stays, or goes, depending on my skill.'' This is admirable writing.\n \n So is her account of the polyphemus moth -- first in its cocoon, then emerging, then crawling away in the presence of a roomful of schoolchildren. It has been directly experienced at what I should say is eye-level. Her account of the migration of the\n monarch butterflies, which makes the reader see what they looked like coming, how they went over, what they left behind them, what the author learned from the whole event, is precise and memorable.\n \n She can also write straight narrative, showing what the book would have gained in point, direction, and shape from being given a little more of it. She takes us through a flood on Tinker Creek and I think she sees truly when she says: ''Tinker\n Creek is out of its four-foot banks. It looks like somebody else's creek that has usurped or eaten our creek and is roving frantically to escape, big and ugly, like a blacksnake caught in a kitchen drawer.'' She walks out\n into the flood on a wall and on the return trip meets a young boy who's going in the opposite direction. ''The wall is one brick wide; we can't pass. So we clasp hands and lean out backwards over the turbulent water;\n our feet interlace like teeth on a zipper, we pull together, stand, and continue on our ways.'' There's grace and quickness of writing. It also marks the rare appearance, momentary as it is, of another human being in her\n book, and the closest any human being comes into the presence of the author.\n \n Annie Dillard is the only person in her book, substantially the only one in her world; I recall no outside human speech coming to break the long soliloquy of the author. Speaking of the universe very often, she is yet self-surrounded, and, beyond that,\n book-surrounded. Her own book might have taken in more of human life without losing a bit of the wonder she was after. Might it not have gained more? Thoreau's wisdom had everything to do with the relationship he saw between nature\n and the community of man. She read Thoreau, including of course his own meteorological journal of the mind.\n \n While spending her days stalking, the young author was spending her nights reading. She read everything she could get her hands on that would elucidate and expand what she was finding out for herself. She copied long passages into her journal, and many\n excerpts appear in her book -- not only from Thoreau, Fabre, Darwin and so on, but from novelists, artists. (An odd bit, unattributed, is tantalizing me: Who said, ''Gravity, to Copernicus, is the nostalgia of things to become\n spheres''?) Her search for a vision has been at firsthand and at secondhand; a dual search.\n \n There remains something about her wishes which is not quite related to the human world. She remarks somewhere, ''I am interested in Alice mainly when she eats the cooky that makes her smaller, I would pare myself or be pared so that I too might\n pass through the merest crack, a gap I know is there in the sky. I am looking just now for the cooky.'' (Contrariwise, she will need to be looking for a little bottle, tied around the neck with a paper label with the words ''DRINK\n ME'' beautifully printed in large letters. And eating the ''little cake'' -- if this is what she means by a cooky -- will only result in her having to say, ''Goodbye, feet!'')\n \n Actually, and not unlike the characters Alice herself meets in Wonderland, the author is given to changing style or shifting moods with disconcerting frequency and abruptness. ''Thanks. For the Memories.'' ''This\n oft was thought, but ne'er so well expresed as by Pliny.'' ''The cottage was Paradise enow.'' You might be reading letters home from camp, where the moment before you might have thought you were deep\n in the Book of Leviticus.\n \n The relationship between the writer and the reader is fully as peculiar and astonishing as the emergence of the polyphemus moth. It too has got to leave the cocoon, has got to draw breath and assume every risk of being alive before the next step, real\n understanding, can take place.\n \n But a writer writes as a writer sees, and while the eyes are rolled up, what appears on paper may be exactly what it sounds like, invocation. ''Mystery itself is as fringed and intricate as the shape of the air in time.'' This is a\n voice that is trying to speak to me out of a cloud instead of from a sociable, even answerable, distance on our same earth. And if I ask, as I do too at times in this book, ''What's going on here?'' the author\n would be likely to invoke the voice again, and we'd be told as we were before: ''The creator loves pizzazz.''\n \n \n She concludes her book by saying, ''And then you walk fearlesslylike the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his\n tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part. The giant water bug ate the world. And like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says 'Glory,' and my right foot says 'Amen':\n in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise.''\n \n And that's the way Annie Dillard goes. Is the Pilgrim on her right road? That depends on what the Pilgrim's destination is.\n \n But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to\n do with than to be cursed with too little to give you -- and other people -- any trouble.\n \n Eudora Welty is the author most recently of the Pulitzer Prize novel,\n''The Optimist's Daughter.''\n \n \n Return to the Books Home Page\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Home |\n Site Index |\n Site Search |\n Forums |\n Archives |\n Marketplace\n \n Quick News |\n Page One Plus |\n International |\n National\/N.Y. |\n Business |\n Technology |\n Science |\n Sports |\n Weather |\n Editorial |\n Op-Ed |\n Arts |\n Automobiles |\n Books |\n Diversions |\n Job Market |\n Real Estate |\n Travel\n \n \n Help\/Feedback |\n Classifieds |\n Services |\n New York Today\n \n \n Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \nLimit the Use of My Sensitive InformationCalifornia Notices",
    "author_name": "Eudora Welty",
    "site_name": "The New York Times",
    "section": "Books",
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    "ai_headline": "Meditation on Seeing",
    "ai_simplified_title": "Eudora Welty Reviews Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek",
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