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How We Spend Our Days Is, Of Course, How We Spend Our Lives. What We Do With This Hour, And That One, Is What We Are Doing. A Schedule Defends From Chaos And Whim. It Is A Net For Catching Days. It Is A Scaffolding On Which A Worker Can Stand And Labor With Both Hands At Sections Of Time. A Schedule Is A Mock-up Of Reason And Order—willed, Faked, And So Brought Into Being; It Is A Peace And A Haven Set Into The Wreck Of Time; It Is A Lifeboat On Which You Find Yourself, Decades Later, Still Living.

-Annie Dillard

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How We Spend Our

Annie Dillard

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How We Spend Our Days Is, Of Course, How We Spend Our Lives. What We Do With This Hour, And That One, Is What We Are Doing. A Schedule Defends From Chaos And Whim. It Is A Net For Catching Days. It Is A Scaffolding On Which A Worker Can Stand And Labor With Both Hands At Sections Of Time. A Schedule Is A Mock-up Of Reason And Order—willed, Faked, And So Brought Into Being; It Is A Peace And A Haven Set Into The Wreck Of Time; It Is A Lifeboat On Which You Find Yourself, Decades Later, Still Living.

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The Mind Wants To Live Forever, Or To Learn A Very Good Reason Why Not. The Mind Wants The World To Return Its Love, Or Its Awareness... The Mind's Sidekick, However, Will Settle For Two Eggs Over Easy. The Dear, Stupid Body Is Easily Satisfied As A Spaniel. And, Incredibly, The Simple Spaniel Can Lure The Brawling Mind To Its Dish. It Is Everlastingly Funny That The Proud, Metaphysically Ambitious Mind Will Hush If You Give It An Egg.

At A Certain Point, You Say To The Woods, To The Sea, To The Mountains, The World, Now I Am Ready. Now I Will Stop And Be Wholly Attentive. You Empty Yourself And Wait, Listening.

An Inuit Hunter Asked The Local Missionary Priest: If I Did Not Know About God And Sin, Would I Go To Hell? No, Said The Priest, Not If You Did Not Know. Then Why, Asked The Inuit Earnestly, Did You Tell Me?

I Am Sorry I Ran From You. I Am Still Running, Running From That Knowledge, That Eye, That Love From Which There Is No Refuge. For You Meant Only Love, And Love, And I Felt Only Fear, And Pain. So Once In Israel Love Came To Us Incarnate, Stood In The Doorway Between Two Worlds, And We Were All Afraid.

There Is No Shortage Of Good Days. It Is Good Lives That Are Hard To Come By.

No Child On Earth Was Ever Meant To Be Ordinary, And You Can See It In Them, And They Know It, Too, But Then The Times Get To Them, And The Wear Out Their Brains Learning What Folks Expect, And Spend Their Strength Trying To Rise Over Those Same Folks.

Admire The World For Never Ending On You -- As You Would An Opponent, Without Taking Your Eyes Away From Him, Or Walking Away.

Does Anything Eat Flowers. I Couldn't Recall Having Seen Anything Eat A Flower - Are They Nature's Privileged Pets?

Today Is One Of Those Excellent January Partly Cloudies In Which Light Chooses An Unexpected Part Of The Landscape To Trick Out In Gilt, And Then The Shadow Sweeps It Away. You Know You're Alive. You Take Huge Steps, Trying To Feel The Planet's Roundness Arc Between Your Feet.

When I First Read The Words 'introvert' And 'extrovert' When I Was 10, I Thought I Was Both.

I Would Like To Learn, Or Remember, How To Live.

People Who Take Photographs During Their Whole Vacation Won't Remember Their Vacation. They'll Only Remember What Photographs They Took.

We Are Here To Witness The Creation And To Abet It.

As A Thinker I Keep Discovering That Beauty Itself Is As Much A Fact, And A Mystery...i Consider Nature's Facts -- Its Beautiful And Grotesque Forms And Events -- In Terms Of The Import To Thought And Their Impetus To The Spirit. In Nature I Find Grace Tangled In A Rapture With Violence; I Find An Intricate Landscape Whose Forms Are Fringed In Death; I Find Mystery, Newness, And A Kind Of Exuberant, Spendthrift Energy.

We Live In All We Seek. The Hidden Shows Up In Too-plain Sight. It Lives Captive On The Face Of The Obvious - The People, Events, And Things Of The Day - To Which We As Sophisticated Children Have Long Since Become Oblivious. What A Hideout: Holiness Lies Spread And Borne Over The Surface Of Time And Stuff Like Color.

I Work Mornings Only. I Go Out To Lunch. Afternoons I Play With The Baby, Walk With My Husband, Or Shovel Mail.

The Universe That Suckled Us Is A Monster That Does Not Care If We Live Or Die--it Does Not Care If It Itself Grinds To A Halt. It Is A Beast Running On Chance And Death, Careening From Nowhere To Nowhere. It Is Fixed And Blind, A Robot Programmed To Kill. We Are Free And Seeing; We Can Only Try To Outwit It At Every Turn To Save Our Lives.

Nowhere To Turn

I Wake Up Thinking: What Am I Reading? What Will I Read Next? I'm Terrified That I'll Run Out, That I Will Read Through All I Want To, And Be Forced To Learn Wildflowers At Last, To Keep Awake.

All My Books Started Out As Extravagant And Ended Up Pure And Plain.

The Way We Live Our Days, Is The Way We Live Our Lives.

The Sensation Of Writing A Book Is The Sensation Of Spinning, Blinded By Love And Daring.

I Sip My Coffee. I Look At The Mountain, Which Is Still Doing Its Tricks, As You Look At A Still-beautiful Face Belonging To A Person Who Was Once Your Lover In Another Country Years Ago: With Fond Nostalgia, And Recognition, But No Real Feelings Save A Secret Astonishment That You Are Now Strangers. Thanks. For The Memories. It Is Ironic That The One Thing That All Religions Recognize As Separating Us From Our Creator--our Very Self-consciousness--is Also The One Thing That Divides Us From Our Fellow Creatures. It Was A Bitter Birthday Present From Evolution, Cutting Us Off At Both Ends.

Beauty And Grace Are Performed Whether Or Not We Sense Them.

What Is A House But A Bigger Skin, And A Neighborhood Map But The World's Skin Ever Expanding?

He Judged The Instant And Let Go; He Flung Himself Loose Into The Stars.

Nature Seems To Exult In Abounding Radicality, Extremism, Anarchy. If We Were To Judge Nature By Its Common Sense Or Likelihood, We Wouldn't Believe The World Existed. In Nature, Improbabilities Are The One Stock In Trade. The Whole Creation Is One Lunatic Fringe. ... No Claims Of Any And All Revelations Could Be So Far-fetched As A Single Giraffe.

For Writing A First Draft Requires From The Writer A Peculiar Internal State Which Ordinary Life Does Not Induce. ... How To Set Yourself Spinning?

Unfortunately, Nature Is Very Much A Now-you-see-it, Now-you-don't Affair. A Fish Flashes, Then Dissolves In The Water Before My Eyes Like So Much Salt. Deer Apparently Ascend Bodily Into Heaven; The Brightest Oriole Fades Into Leaves.

We Are Here To Witness The Creation And To Abet It. We Are Here To Notice Each Thing So Each Thing Gets Noticed. Together We Notice Not Only Each Mountain Shadow And Each Stone On The Beach But, Especially, We Notice The Beautiful Faces And Complex Natures Of Each Other. We Are Here To Bring To Consciousness The Beauty And Power That Are Around Us And To Praise The People Who Are Here With Us. We Witness Our Generation And Our Times. We Watch The Weather. Otherwise, Creation Would Be Playing To An Empty House.

I Feel As Though I Stand At The Foot Of An Infinitely High Staircase, Down Which Some Exuberant Spirit Is Flinging Tennis Ball After Tennis Ball, Eternally, And The One Thing I Want In The World Is A Tennis Ball.

Like Any Child, I Slid Into Myself Perfectly Fitted, As A Diver Meets Her Reflection In A Pool. Her Fingertips Enter The Fingertips On The Water, Her Wrists Slide Up Her Arms. The Diver Wraps Herself In Her Reflection Wholly, Sealing It At The Toes, And Wears It As She Climbs Rising From The Pool, And Ever After.

Theirs Is The Mystery Of Continuous Creation And All That Providence Implies: The Uncertainty Of Vision, The Horror Of The Fixed, The Dissolution Of The Present, The Intricacy Of Beauty, The Pressure Of Fecundity, The Elusiveness Of The Free, And The Flawed Nature Of Perfection.

The Creative Process Obtains In All Creative Acts. So If I'm Painting Suddenly I'll See Something That I Didn't See Before.

The Body Of Literature, With Its Limits And Edges, Exists Outside Some People And Inside Others. Only After The Writer Lets Literature Shape Her Can She Perhaps Shape Literature.

Landscape Consists In The Multiple, Overlapping Intricacies And Forms That Exist In A Given Space At A Moment In Time.

Cruelty Is A Mystery, And The Waste Of Pain. But If We Describe A Word To Compass These Things, A World That Is A Long, Brute Game, Then We Bump Against Another Mystery: The Inrush Of Power And Delight, The Canary That Sings On The Skull.

You Do What You Do Out Of Your Private Love Of The Thing Itself.

I Write In My Own Journal When Something Extraordinary Or Funny Happens. And There's Some Nice Imagery In There. I Don't Think Of What To Do With It.

Knowing You Are Alive Is Watching On Every Side Your Generation's Short Time Falling Away As Fast As Rivers Drop Through Air, And Feeling It Hit.

Private Life, Book Life, Took Place Where Words Met Imagination Without Passing Through The World.

The Answer Must Be, I Think, That Beauty And Grace Are Performed Whether Or Not We Will Or Sense Them. The Least We Can Do Is Try To Be There.

I Think It Would Be Well, And Proper, And Obedient, And Pure, To Grasp Your One Necessity And Not Let It Go, To Dangle From It Limp Wherever It Takes You.

After The One Extravagant Gesture Of Creation In The First Place, The Universe Has Continued To Deal Exclusively In Extravagances, Flinging Intricacies And Colossi Down Aeons Of Emptiness, Heaping Profusions On Profligacies With Ever-fresh Vigor. The Whole Show Has Been On Fire From The Word Go. I Come Down To The Water To Cool My Eyes. But Everywhere I Look I See Fire; That Which Isn't Flint Is Tinder, And The Whole World Sparks And Flames.

Appealing Workplaces Are To Be Avoided. One Wants A Room With No View, So Imagination Can Meet Memory In The Dark.

We Are Here To Bring To Consciousness The Beauty And Power That Are Around Us And To Praise The People Who Are Here With Us.

One Of The Few Things I Know About Writing Is This: Spend It All, Shoot It, Play It, Lose It, All, Right Away, Every Time. Do Not Hoard What Seems Good For A Later Place In The Book, Or For Another Book, Give It, Give It All, Give It Now.

If We Were To Judge Nature By Common Sense Or Likelihood, We Wouldn't Believe The World Existed.

The Sea Pronounces Something, Over And Over, In A Hoarse Whisper; I Cannot Quite Make It Out.

A Schedule Defends From Chaos And Whim. A Net For Catching Days.

Novels Written With Film Contracts In Mind Have A Faint But Unmistakable, And Ruinous, Odor.

We Live Half Our Waking Lives And All Of Our Sleeping Lives In Some Private, Useless, And Insensible Waters We Never Mention Or Recall.

About Five Years Ago I Saw A Mockingbird Make A Straight Vertical Descent From The Roof Gutter Of A Four-story Building. It Was An Act As Careless And Spontaneous As The Curl Of A Stem Or The Kindling Of A Star.

You Search, You Break Your Heart, Your Back, Your Brain, And Then-and Only Then-it Is Handed To You.

Old Memories Are Very Easy To Get Except That Once You Write About Something You've Destroyed It.

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.

We Have Not Yet Encountered Any God Who Is As Merciful As A Man Who Flicks A Beetle Over On Its Feet.

Love So Sprang At Her, She Honestly Thought No One Had Ever Looked Into It. Where Was It In Literature? Someone Would Have Written Something. She Must Not Have Recognized It. Time To Read Everything Again.

Who And Of What Import Were The Men Whose Bones Bulk The Great Wall, The Thirty Million Mao Starved, Or The Thirty Million Children Not Yet Five Who Die Each Year Now? Why, They Are The Insignificant Others, Of Course; Living Or Dead, They Are Just Some Of The Plentiful Others...and You? To What End Were We Billions Of Oddballs Born?

Even If Things Are As Bad As They Could Possible Be, And As Meaningless, Then Matters Of Truth Are Themselves Indifferent; We May As Well Please Our Sensibilities And, With As Much Spirit As We Can Muster, Go Out With A Buck And A Wing.

God Gave Me A Talent To Draw. I 'owed' It To Him To Develop The Talent.

By Dipping Us Children In The Bible So Often, They Hoped, I Think, To Give Our Lives A Serious Tint, And To Provide Us With Quaintly Magnificent Snatches Of Prayer To Produce As Charms While, Say, Being Mugged For Our Cash Or Jewels.

I Worked So Hard All My Life, And All I Want To Do Now Is Read.

Doing Something Does Not Require Discipline. It Creates Its Own Discipline - With A Little Help From Caffeine.

I Used To Have A Cat, An Old Fighting Tom, Who Would Jump Through The Open Window By My Bed In The Middle Of The Night And Land On My Chest. I'd Half-awaken. He'd Stick His Skull Under My Nose And Purr, Stinking Of Urine And Blood. Some Nights He Kneaded My Bare Chest With His Front Paws, Powerfully, Arching His Back, As If Sharpening His Claws, Or Pummeling A Mother For Milk. And Some Mornings I'd Wake In Daylight To Find My Body Covered With Paw Prints In Blood; I Looked As Though I'd Been Painted With Roses.

I'm A Housewife: I Spend Far More Time On Housework Than Anything Else.

Every Spring He Vowed To Quit Teaching School, And Every Summer He Missed His Pupils And Searched For Them On The Streets.

The Mind Of The Writer Does Indeed Do Something Before It Dies, And So Does Its Owner, But I Would Be Hard Put To Call It Living.

The Surest Sign Of Age Is Loneliness.

We Still And Always Want Waking.

Why Did I Have To Keep Learning This Same Thing Over And Over?

An Eskimo Shaman Said, Life's Greatest Danger Lies In The Fact That Man's Food Consists Entirely Of Souls.

I Wake Expectant, Hoping To See A New Thing.

When I Was Six Or Seven Years Old, Growing Up In Pittsburgh, I Used To Take A Precious Penny Of My Own And Hide It For Someone Else To Find. I Was Greatly Excited At The Thought Of The First Lucky Passerby Who Would Receive A Gift In This Way, Regardless Of Merit, A Free Gift From The Universe. . . . I've Been Thinking About Seeing. There Are Lots Of Things To See, Unwrapped Gifts And Free Surprises. The World Is Fairly Studded And Strewn With Pennies Cast Broadside From A Generous Hand.

Writers Serve As The Memory Of A People. They Chew Over Our Public Past.

Every Live Thing Is A Survivor On A Kind Of Extended Emergency Bivouac.

Having Chosen This Foolishness, I Was A Free Being. How Could The World Ever Stop Me, How Could I Betray Myself, If I Was Not Afraid?

No One Can Help You If You're Stuck In A Work. Only You Can Figure A Way Out, Because Only You Can See The Work's Possibilities.

The Written Word Is Weak. Many People Prefer Life To It. Life Gets Your Blood Going, & It Smells Good. Writing Is Mere Writing, Literature Is Mere. It Appeals Only To The Subtlest Senses—the Imagination’s Vision, & The Imagination’s Hearing—& The Moral Sense, & The Intellect. This Writing That You Do, That So Thrills You, That So Rocks & Exhilarates You, As If You Were Dancing Next To The Band, Is Barely Audible To Anyone Else.

There Is No Such Thing As An Artist: There Is Only The World Lit Or Unlit As The Light Allows. When The Candle Is Burning, Who Looks At The Wick? When The Candle Is Out, Who Needs It?

The More You Read, The More You Will Write. The Better The Stuff You Read, The Better The Stuff You Will Write.

Our Life Is A Faint Tracing On The Surface Of Mystery.

Cruelty Is A Mystery, And A Waste Of Pain.

The Mind Wants The World To Return Its Love, Or Its Awareness; The Mind Wants To Know All The World, And All Eternity, And God.

Whenever An Encounter Between A Writer Of Good Will And A Regular Person Of Good Will Happens To Touch On The Subject Of Writing, Each Person Discovers, Dismayed, That Good Will Is Of No Earthly Use. The Conversation Cannot Proceed.

I Still Try To Keep My Eyes Open. I'm Always On The Lookout For Antlion Traps In Sandy Soil, Monarch Pupae Near Milkweed, Skipper Larvae In Locust Leaves. These Things Are Utterly Common, And I've Not Seen One

Make Connections; Let Rip; And Dance Where You Can.

I Think That The Dying Pray At The Last Not Please But Thank You, As A Guest Thanks His Host At The Door. Falling From Airplanes The People Are Crying Thank You, Thank You, All Down The Air; And The Cold Carriages Draw Up For Them On The Rocks.

As Soon As Beauty Is Sought Not From Religion And Love, But For Pleasure, It Degrades The Seeker.

Write About Winter In The Summer.

Peeping Through My Keyhold I See Within The Range Of Only About 30 Percent Of The Light That Comes From The Sun; The Rest Is Infrared And Some Little Ultraviolet, Perfectly Apparent To Many Animals, But Invisible To Me. A Nightmare Network Of Ganglia, Charged And Firing Without My Knowledge, Cuts And Splices What I See, Editing It For My Brain. Donald E. Carr Points Out That The Sense Impressions Of One-celled Animals Are Not Edited For The Brian: 'this Is Philosophically Interesting In A Rather Mournful Way, Since It Means That Only The Simplest Animals Perceive The Universe As It Is.

The Silence Is All There Is. It Is The Alpha And The Omega, It Is God's Brooding Over The Face Of The Waters; It Is The Blinded Note Of The Ten Thousand Things, The Whine Of Wings. You Take A Step In The Right Direction To Pray To This Silence, And Even To Address The Prayer To "world." Distinctions Blur. Quit Your Tents. Pray Without Ceasing.

The Point Of Going Somewhere Like The Napo River In Ecuador Is Not To See The Most Spectacular Anything. It Is Simply To See What Is There.

It Is Difficult To Undo Our Own Damage, And To Recall To Our Presence That Which We Have Asked To Leave.

There Are No Events But Thoughts And The Heart's Hard Turning, The Heart's Slow Learning Where To Love And Whom. The Rest Is Merely Gossip, And Tales For Other Times.

The Pulitzer Is More Useful Than Meaningful.

The Novel Is A Game Or Joke Shared Between Author And Reader.

If You Stay Still, Earth Buries You, Ready Or Not.

What Could You Say To A Dying Person That Would Not Enrage By Its Triviality?

The Life Of Sensation Is The Life Of Greed; It Requires More And More. The Life Of The Spirit Requires Less And Less.

It's About Waking Up. A Child Wakes Up Over And Over Again, And Notices That She's Living. She Dreams Along, Loving The Exuberant Life Of The Senses, In Love With Beauty And Power, Oblivious To Herself -- And Then Suddenly, Bingo, She Wakes Up And Feels Herself Alive. She Notices Her Own Awareness. And She Notices That She Is Set Down Here, Mysteriously, In A Going World.

Skin Was Earth; It Was Soil. I Could See, Even On My Own Skin, The Joined Trapezoids Of Dust Specks God Had Wetted And Stuck With His Spit The Morning He Made Adam From Dirt. Now, All These Generations Later, We People Could Still See On Our Skin The Inherited Prints Of The Dust Specks Of Eden.

The World Did Not Have Me In Mind; It Had No Mind. It Was A Coincidental Collection Of Things And People, Of Items, An I Myself Was One Such Item...the Things In The World Did Not Necessarily Cause My Overwhelming Feelings; The Feelings Were Inside Me, Beneath My Skin, Behind My Ribs, Withing My Skull. They Were Even, To Some Extent, Under My Control.

I Saw In A Blue Haze All The World Poured Flat And Pale Between The Mountains

You Are Wrong If You Think That You Can In Any Way Take The Vision And Tame It... The Vision Is Not So Much Destroyed, Exactly, As It Is, By The Time You Have Finished, Forgotten. It Has Been Replaced By This Changeling.

I Think The Dying Pray At The Last Not "please," But "thank You," As A Guest Thanks His Host At The Door.

The Interior Life Is Often Stupid.

He Is Careful Of What He Reads, For That Is What He Will Write. He Is Careful Of What He Learns, For That Is What He Will Know.

There Were No Formerly Heroic Times, And There Was No Formerly Pure Generation. There Is No One Here But Us Chickens, And So It Has Always Been.

There Is No Shortage Of Good Days. It Is Good Lives That Are Hard To Come By. A Life Of Good Days Lived In The Senses Is Not Enough. The Life Of Sensation Is The Life Of Greed; It Requires More And More. The Life Of The Spirit Requires Less And Less; Time Is Ample And Its Passage Sweet. Who Would Call A Day Spent Reading A Good Day? But A Life Spent Reading -- That Is A Good Life.

Write About Winter In The Summer. Describe Norway As Ibsen Did, From A Desk In Italy; Describe Dublin As James Joyce Did, From A Desk In Paris. Willa Cather Wrote Her Prairie Novels In New York City; Mark Twain Wrote Huckleberry Finn In Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, Scholars Learned That Walt Whitman Rarely Left His Room.

We Live In All We Seek.

You Can't Test Courage Cautiously, So I Ran Hard And Waved My Arms Hard, Happy.

I Breathed The Air Of History All Unaware, And Walked Oblivious Through Its Littered Layers.

Your Work Is To Keep Cranking The Flywheel That Turns The Gears That Spin The Belt In The Engine Of Belief That Keeps You And Your Desk In Midair.

For All The Insularity Of The Old Guard, Pittsburgh Was Always An Open And Democratic Town.

When I Teach, I Preach. I Thump The Bible. I Exhort My Students Morally. I Talk To Them About The Dedicated Life.

People Who Read Are Not Too Lazy To Turn On The Television; They Prefer Books.

Tonight I Walked Around The Pond Scaring Frogs; A Couple Of Them Jumped Off, Going, In Effect, Eek, And Most Grunted, And The Pond Was Still. But One Big Frog, Bright Green Like A Poster-paint Frog, Didn't Jump, So I Waved My Arm And Stamped To Scare It, And It Jumped Suddenly, And I Jumped, And Then Everything In The Pond Jumped, And I Laughed And Laughed.

The Way To Learn About A Writer Is To Read The Text. Or Texts.

What I Sought In Books Was Imagination. It Was Depth, Depth Of Thought And Feeling; Some Sort Of Extreme Of Subject Matter; Some Nearness To Death; Some Call To Courage. I Myself Was Getting Wild; I Wanted Wildness, Originality, Genius, Rapture, Hope. ... What I Sought In Books Was A World Whose Surfaces, Whose People And Events And Days Lived, Actually Matched The Exaltation Of The Interior Life. There You Could Live.

Noticing And Remembering Everything Would Trap Bright Scenes To Light And Fill The Blank And Darkening Past Which Was Already Piling Up Behind Me. The Growing Size Of That Blank And Ever-darkening Past Frightened Me; It Loomed Beside Me Like A Hole In The Air And Battened On Scraps Of My Life I Failed To Claim. If One Day I Forgot To Notice My Life, And Be Damned Grateful For It, The Blank Cave Would Suck Me Up Entire.

Books Swept Me Away, This Way And That, One After The Other; I Made Endless Vows According To Their Lights For I Believed Them.

The Soul May Ask God For Anything, And Never Fail.

How We Spend Our Days Is, Of Course, How We Spend Our Lives.

I Never Met A Man Who Was Shaken By A Field Of Identical Blades Of Grass. An Acre Of Poppies And A Forest Of Spruce Boggle No One's Mind.

Last Forever!' Who Hasn't Prayed That Prayer? You Were Lucky To Get It In The First Place. The Present Is A Freely Given Canvas. That It Is Constantly Being Ripped Apart And Washed Downstream Goes Without Saying.

I Couldn't Unpeach The Peaches.

The Creatures I Seek Do Not Want To Be Seen.

Anything You Do Not Give Freely And Abundantly Becomes Lost To You.

The Painter... Does Not Fit The Paints To The World. He Most Certainly Does Not Fit The World To Himself. He Fits Himself To The Paint. The Self Is The Servant Who Bears The Paintbox And Its Inherited Contents.

No One Escapes The Wilderness On The Way To The Promised Land.

In Literary History, Generation Follows Generation In A Rage.

Why Do We People In Churches Seem Like Cheerful, Brainless Tourists On A Packaged Tour Of The Absolute?

When You Write, You Lay Out A Line Of Words. The Line Of Words Is A Miner's Pick, A Wood Carver's Gouge, A Surgeon's Probe. You Wield It, And It Digs A Path You Follow. Soon You Find Yourself Deep In New Territory. Is It A Dead End, Or Have You Located The Real Subject? You Will Know Tomorrow, Or This Time Next Year.

When I Walk With A Camera, I Walk From Shot To Shot, Reading The Light On A Calibrated Meter. When I Walk Without A Camera, My Own Shutter Opens, And The Moment's Light Prints On My Own Silver Gut. When I See This Second Way I Am Above All An Unscrupulous Observer.

There Is A Certain Age At Which A Child Looks At You In All Earnestness And Delivers A Long, Pleased Speech In All The True Inflections Of Spoken English, But With Not One Recognizable Syllable. There Is No Way You Can Tell The Child That If Language Had Been A Melody, He Had Mastered It And Done Well, But That Since It Was In Fact A Sense, He Had Botched It Utterly.

What A Hideout: Holiness Lies Spread And Borne Over The Surface Of Time And Stuff Like Color.

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.

It Has Always Been A Happy Thought To Me That The Creek Runs On All Night, New Every Minute, Whether I Wish It Or Know It Or Care, As A Closed Book On A Shelf Continues To Whisper To Itself Its Own Inexhaustible Tale.

It's A Little Silly To Finally Learn How To Write At This Age. But I Long Ago Realized I Was Secretly Sincere.

The World Knew You Before You Knew The World.

Write As If You Are Dying.

Caring Passionately About Something Isn't Against Nature, And It Isn't Against Human Nature. It's What We're Here To Do.

Every Book Has An Intrinsic Impossibility, Which Its Writer Discovers As Soon As His First Excitement Dwindles.

Time Is The Warp And Matter The Weft Of The Woven Texture Of Beauty In Space, And Death Is The Hurling Shuttle.

I Had Good Innings, As The British Say. I Wrote For 38 Years At The Top Of My Form, And I Wanted To Quit On A High Note.

The Point Of The Dragonfly's Terrible Lip, The Giant Water Bug, Birdsong, Or The Beautiful Dazzle And Flash Of Sunlighted Minnows,is Not That It All Fits Together Like Clockwork--for It Doesn'tbut That It All Flows So Freely Wild, Like The Creek, That It All Surges In Such A Free, Finged Tangle. Freedom Is The World's Water And Weather, The World's Nourishment Freely Given, Its Soil And Sap: And The Creator Loves Pizzazz.

Are You Living Just A Little And Calling That Life?

Fiction Keeps Its Audience By Retaining The World As Its Subject Matter. People Like The World. Many People Actually Prefer It To Art And Spend Their Days By Choice In The Thick Of It.

A Work In Progress Quickly Becomes Feral. It Reverts To A Wild State Overnight. It Is Barely Domesticated, A Mustang On Which You One Day Fastened A Halter, But Which Now You Cannot Catch. It Is A Lion You Cage In Your Study. As The Work Grows, It Gets Harder To Control; It Is A Lion Growing In Strength. You Must Visit It Every Day And Reassert Your Mastery Over It. If You Skip A Day, You Are, Quite Rightly, Afraid To Open The Door To Its Room. You Enter Its Room With Bravura, Holding A Chair At The Thing And Shouting, "simba!

But Enough Is Enough. One Turns At Last Even From Glory Itself With A Sigh Of Relief. From The Depths Of Mystery, And Even From The Heights Of Splendor, We Bounce Back And Hurry For The Latitudes Of Home.

As A Life's Work, I Would Remember Everything - Everything, Against Loss. I Would Go Through Life Like A Plankton Net.

Remembers Everything

[insects] Are Not Only Cold-blooded, And Green- And Yellow-blooded, But Are Also Cased In A Clacking Horn. They Have Rigid Eyes And Brains Strung Down Their Backs. But They Make Up The Bulk Of Our Comrades-at-life, So I Look To Them For A Glimmer Of Companionship.

How We Spend Our Days Is, Of Course, How We Spend Our Lives. What We Do With This Hour And With That One, Is What We Are Doing.

To Crank Myself Up I Stood On A Jack And Ran Myself Up. I Tightened Myself Like A Bolt. I Inserted Myself In A Vise-clamp And Wound The Handle Till The Pressure Built. I Drank Coffee In Titrated Doses. It Was A Tricky Business, Requiring The Finely Tuned Judgment Of A Skilled Anesthesiologist. There Was A Tiny Range Within Which Coffee Was Effective, Short Of Which It Was Useless, And Beyond Which, Fatal.

I Had Been My Whole Life A Bell, And Never Knew It Until At That Moment I Was Lifted And Struck.

Young Children Have No Sense Of Wonder. They Bewilder Well, But Few Things Surprise Them. All Of It Is New To Young Children, After All, And Equally Gratuitous.

Writing A Book Is Like Rearing Children -- Willpower Has Very Little To Do With It. If You Have A Little Baby Crying In The Middle Of The Night, And If You Depend Only On Willpower To Get You Out Of Bed To Feed The Baby, That Baby Will Starve. You Do It Out Of Love.

At Night I Read And Write, And Things I Have Never Understood Become Clear; I Reap The Harvest Of The Rest Of The Year's Planting

A Writer Looking For Subjects Inquires Not After What He Loves Best, But After What He Alone Loves At All.

Wherever We Go, There Seems To Be Only One Business At Hand - That Of Finding Workable Compromises Between The Sublimity Of Our Ideas And The Absurdity Of The Fact Of Us.

The Real And Proper Question Is: Why Is It Beautiful?

Take A Quick Dip, Relax With A Schnapps And A Sandwich, Stretch Out, Have A Smoke, Take A Nap Or Just Rest, And Then Sit Around And Chat Until Three. Then I Hunt Some More Until Sundown, Bathe Again, Put On White Tie And Tails To Keep Up Appearances, Eat A Huge Dinner, Smoke A Cigar And Sleep Like A Log Until The Sun Comes Up Again To Redden The Eastern Sky. This Is Living…. Could It Be More Perfect?

Crystals Grew Inside Rock Like Arithmetic Flowers. They Lengthened And Spread, Added Plane To Plane In An Awed And Perfect Obedience To An Absolute Geometry That Even Stones - Maybe Only The Stones - Understood.

You Do Not Have To Sit Outside In The Dark. If, However, You Want To Look At The Stars, You Will Find That Darkness Is Necessary. But The Stars Neither Require Nor Demand It.

I Had Been Chipping At The World Idly, And Had By Accident Uncovered Vast And Labyrinthine Further Worlds Within It.

I Cannot Imagine A Sorrier Pursuit Than Struggling For Years To Write A Book That Attempts To Appeal To People Who Do Not Read In The First Place.

Don't Save Something Good For A Later Place. Don't Hold Back From Your Students, From The Poor, Don't Try To Keep Anything For Yourself 'cause It'll Turn To Ashes.

There Must Be Bands Of Enthusiasts For Everything On Earth-fanatics Who Shared A Vocabulary, A Batch Of Technical Skills And Equipment, And, Perhaps, A Vision Of Some Single Slice Of The Beauty And Mystery Of Things, Of Their Complexity, Fascination, And Unexpectedness.

I Have Since Only Rarely Seen The Tree With The Lights In It. The Vision Comes And Goes, Mostly Goes, But I Live For It, For The Moment When The Mountains Open And A New Light Roars In Spate Through The Crack, And The Mountains Slam.

Why Do You Never Find Anything Written About That Idiosyncratic Thought You Advert To, About Your Fascination With Something No One Else Understands? Because It Is Up To You. There Is Something You Find Interesting, For A Reason Hard To Explain. It Is Hard To Explain Because You Have Never Read It On Any Page; There You Begin. You Were Made And Set Here To Give Voice To This, Your Own Astonishment.

The Sense Impressions Of One-celled Animals Are Not Edited For The Brain. This Is Philosophically Interesting In A Rather Mournful Way, Since It Means That Only The Simplest Animals Perceive The Universe As It Is.

When You Open A Book,” The Sentimental Library Posters Said, “anything Can Happen.” This Was So. A Book Of Fiction Was A Bomb. It Was A Land Mine You Wanted To Go Off. You Wanted It To Blow Your Whole Day. Unfortunately, Hundreds Of Thousands Of Books Were Duds. They Had Been Rusting Out Of Everyone’s Way For So Long That They No Longer Worked. There Was No Way To Distinguish The Duds From The Live Mines Except To Throw Yourself At Them Headlong, One By One.

Time Is The Continuous Loop, The Snakeskin With Scales Endlessly Overlapping Without Beginning Or End, Or Time Is An Ascending Spiral If You Will, Like A Child's Toy Slinky.

There Is A Muscular Energy In Sunlight Corresponding To The Spiritual Energy Of Wind.

One Of The Few Things I Know About Writing Is This: Spend It All, Shoot It, Play It, Lose It, All, Right Away, Every Time. Do Not Hoard What Seems Good For A Later Place In The Book, Or For Another Book; Give It, Give It All, Give It Now. . . . Something More Will Arise For Later, Something Better. These Things Fill From Behind, From Beneath, Like Well Water. Similarly, The Impulse To Keep To Yourself What You Have Learned Is Not Only Shameful, It Is Destructive. Anything You Do Not Give Freely And Abundantly Becomes Lost To You. You Open Your Safe And Find Ashes.

A Schedule Defends From Chaos And Whim. It Is A Net For Catching Days. It Is A Scaffolding On Which A Worker Can Stand And Labor With Both Hands At Sections Of Time.

Just Once I Wanted A Task That Required All The Joy I Had. Day After Day I Had Noticed That If I Waited Long Enough, My Strong Unexpressed Joy Would Dwindle And Dissipate Inside Me, Like A Fire Subsiding . . . . Just This Once I Wanted To Let It Rip.

On Plenty Of Days The Writer Can Write Three Or Four Pages, And On Plenty Of Other Days He Concludes He Must Throw Them Away.

Poetry Has Been Able To Function Quite Directly As Human Interpretation Of The Raw, Loose Universe. It Is A Mixture, If You Will, Of Journalism And Metaphysics, Or Of Science And Religion.

The Irrational Haunts The Metaphysical.

The World Is Fairly Studded And Strewn With Pennies Cast Broadside By A Generous Hand. But- And This Is The Point- Who Gets Excited By A Mere Penny? But If You Cultivate A Healthy Poverty And Simplicity, So That Finding A Penny Will Literally Make Your Day, Then, Since The World Is In Fact Planted In Pennies, You Have With Your Poverty Bought A Lifetime Of Days.

The Secret Is Not To Write About What You Love Best, But About What You, Alone, Love At All.

A Shepherd On A Hilltop Who Looks At A Mess Of Stars And Thinks, ‘there’s A Hunter, A Plow, A Fish,’ Is Making Mental Connections That Have As Much Real Force In The Universe As The Very Fires In Those Stars Themselves.

I Alternate Between Thinking Of The Planet As Home - Dear And Familiar Stone Hearth And Garden - And As A Hard Land Of Exile In Which We Are All Sojourners.

The Dear, Stupid Body Is As Easily Satisfied As A Spaniel.

At Its Best, The Sensation Of Writing Is That Of Any Unmerited Grace. It Is Handed To You, But Only If You Look For It.

Self-consciousness Is The Curse Of The City And All That Sophistication Implies.

Silence Is Not Our Heritage But Our Destiny; We Live Where We Want To Live.

I Am A Fugitive And A Vagabond, A Sojourner Seeking Signs.

Ecstasy, I Think, Is A Soul's Response To The Waves Holiness Makes As It Nears.

Adverbs Are A Sign That You've Used The Wrong Verb.

Divinity Is Not Playful. The Universe Was Not Made In Jest But In Solemn Incomprehensibl E Earnest. By A Power That Is Unfathomably Secret, And Holy, And Fleet. There Is Nothing To Be Done About It, But Ignore It, Or See.

When I Was Quite Young I Fondly Imagined That All Foreign Languages Were Codes For English. I Thought That "hat," Say, Was The Real And Actual Name Of The Thing, But That People In Other Countries, Who Obstinately Persisted In Speaking The Code Of Their Forefathers, Might Use The Word "ibu," Say, To Designate Not Merely The Concept Hat, But The English Word "hat." I Knew Only One Foreign Word, "oui," And Since It Had Three Letters As Did The Word For Which It Was A Code, It Seemed, Touchingly Enough, To Confirm My Theory.

The Extravagant Gesture Is The Very Stuff Of Creation.

A Schedule Is A Mock-up Of Reason And Order - Willed, Faked, And So Brought Into Being.

What Have We Been Doing All These Centuries But Trying To Call God Back To The Mountain, Or, Failing That, Raise A Peep Out Of Anything That Isn't Us? What Is The Difference Between A Cathedral And A Physics Lab? Are Not They Both Saying: Hello? We Spy On Whales And On Interstellar Radio Objects; We Starve Ourselves And Pray Till We're Blue.

She Read Books As One Would Breathe Air, To Fill Up And Live.

Those Of Us Who Read Carried Around With Us Like Martyrs A Secret Knowledge, A Secret Joy, And A Secret Hope: There Is A Life Worth Living Where History Is Still Taking Place; There Are Ideas Worth Dying For, And Circumstances Where Courage Is Still Prized.

We Wake, If Ever At All, To Mystery.

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