crazy?
"In America, if a woman has to publicly claim, "I'm not insane," it pretty much means the opposite," claims Salon Magazine, in an old piece about genius nature-lover essayist-sometime-fiction-writer Annie Dillard. "In 1992, Dillard made an amazing admission to Mary Cantwell in the New York Times Magazine, saying that she spent the night 'crying uncontrollably' over Cantwell's questions about the writer's faith. 'Just because I'm religious doesn't mean I'm insane,' Dillard insisted."
The reason I read this today is that we went over an entire book of hers in class today, Holy the Firm. Granted, the book is what, 70 pages of length? But it is every bit as hopelessly compressed as a poem, and quite often as baffling. I love, love, love classes like this. My fellow classmates are forced to resort to head-shaking and laughter, calling her crazy and telling tales about how difficult a read the book was. They must play it off. But behind it, there's a fear of what one missed, of seeing an intelligence greater than your own.
I did not pity our teacher, trying to shepherd us through this text on the nature of reality, the goodness of God and the duty of the artist in one class period. She angered me when she said again that of course, part of why this book isn't as engaging is because it's non-fiction and doesn't hinge on characters or anything.
"And she even says that nothing happens!" Yes - somewhere Dillard stops for one sentence to say that "nothing will happen in this book," except at the intersections where eternity clips time.
"That's the first red flag right there," muttered the boy next to me.
How funny, an outright admission by a writer that "nothing is going to happen" as a bad thing. Much of our lives seem 10 times more mundane than the existence Dillard describes in Holy the Firm, in which the act of waking up or walking down a path is spiritually cathartic. Nothing happening? It was merely a note to the people she spoke about twenty pages earlier, the ones she was unsuccessfully trying to explain to about what it means to be a writer. She compared it to a moth flying into a candle and sticking in the wax, its body a hollow cone through which flame burns bright, illumining the darkness.
If Annie believes, then her voice is the farthest thing from a token "Christian" voice that I can picture. She risks with her words, with her heart. Relating the tale of a neighbor girl whose face is burnt off in a freak accident, she curses God - not with obscenities, but with emotionally raw, eloquent language. The way she has engaged in a search for Him through all the book thus far makes it that much more painful, when she decides He must be a brute after all.
But there's the section after that, in which Dillard recognizes how the little girl may be the moth in the flame - already living at a higher, purified plane of life than Dillard herself. The little girl is like the blind man in the Bible who, Jesus said, who did nothing to deserve his state but was made so to show the works of God.
We stumbled through it not terribly, like a gradeschooler playing a recital piece. We thought about ourselves too much and not enough simultaneously to get it right. And still we learned something.
I'm not certain I want to live like Dillard, though sometimes I feel I do. It is craziness, it is burning in a husk of one's self, set on fire involuntarily, aching. I will not live alone and meditate on the nature of reality. I want to write something more like An American Childhood than Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
But nevertheless, class was an encouragement. That somebody that impenetrable was still on the syllabus. That we all stringed along through the door with her book, and hacked away at it with discussion questions on paper, and poked holes in it, emerged feeling humbled but not entirely stupid. I have a feeling some of them will give her another chance someday.
The reason I read this today is that we went over an entire book of hers in class today, Holy the Firm. Granted, the book is what, 70 pages of length? But it is every bit as hopelessly compressed as a poem, and quite often as baffling. I love, love, love classes like this. My fellow classmates are forced to resort to head-shaking and laughter, calling her crazy and telling tales about how difficult a read the book was. They must play it off. But behind it, there's a fear of what one missed, of seeing an intelligence greater than your own.
I did not pity our teacher, trying to shepherd us through this text on the nature of reality, the goodness of God and the duty of the artist in one class period. She angered me when she said again that of course, part of why this book isn't as engaging is because it's non-fiction and doesn't hinge on characters or anything.
"And she even says that nothing happens!" Yes - somewhere Dillard stops for one sentence to say that "nothing will happen in this book," except at the intersections where eternity clips time.
"That's the first red flag right there," muttered the boy next to me.
How funny, an outright admission by a writer that "nothing is going to happen" as a bad thing. Much of our lives seem 10 times more mundane than the existence Dillard describes in Holy the Firm, in which the act of waking up or walking down a path is spiritually cathartic. Nothing happening? It was merely a note to the people she spoke about twenty pages earlier, the ones she was unsuccessfully trying to explain to about what it means to be a writer. She compared it to a moth flying into a candle and sticking in the wax, its body a hollow cone through which flame burns bright, illumining the darkness.
If Annie believes, then her voice is the farthest thing from a token "Christian" voice that I can picture. She risks with her words, with her heart. Relating the tale of a neighbor girl whose face is burnt off in a freak accident, she curses God - not with obscenities, but with emotionally raw, eloquent language. The way she has engaged in a search for Him through all the book thus far makes it that much more painful, when she decides He must be a brute after all.
But there's the section after that, in which Dillard recognizes how the little girl may be the moth in the flame - already living at a higher, purified plane of life than Dillard herself. The little girl is like the blind man in the Bible who, Jesus said, who did nothing to deserve his state but was made so to show the works of God.
We stumbled through it not terribly, like a gradeschooler playing a recital piece. We thought about ourselves too much and not enough simultaneously to get it right. And still we learned something.
I'm not certain I want to live like Dillard, though sometimes I feel I do. It is craziness, it is burning in a husk of one's self, set on fire involuntarily, aching. I will not live alone and meditate on the nature of reality. I want to write something more like An American Childhood than Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
But nevertheless, class was an encouragement. That somebody that impenetrable was still on the syllabus. That we all stringed along through the door with her book, and hacked away at it with discussion questions on paper, and poked holes in it, emerged feeling humbled but not entirely stupid. I have a feeling some of them will give her another chance someday.