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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.

-Annie Dillard

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I Sip My Coffee.

Annie Dillard

...

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.

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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.

Are You Living Just A Little And Calling That Life?

Hasidism Has A Tradition That One Of Man's Purposes Is To Assist God In The Work Of Redemption By "hallowing" The Things Of Creation. By A Tremendous Heave Of His Spirit, The Devout Man Frees The Divine Sparks Trapped In The Mute Things Of Time; He Uplifts The Forms And Moments Of Creation, Bearing Them Aloft Into That Rare Air And Hallowing Fire In Which All Clays Must Shatter And Burst. Keeping The Subsoil World Under Trees In Mind, In Intelligence, Is The Least I Can Do.

How You Spend Your Days Is How You Spend Your Life.

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

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.

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.

It Would Seem That Emotions Are The Curse, Not Death-emotions That Appear To Have Developed Upon A Few Freaks As A Special Curse From Malevolence. All Right Then. It Is Our Emotions That Are Amiss. We Are Freaks, The World Is Fine, And Let Us All Go Have Lobotomies To Restore Us To A Natural State. We Can Leave The Library Then, Go Back To The Creek Lobotomized, And Live On Its Banks As Untroubled As Any Muskrat Or Reed. You First.

You Can't Test Courage Cautiously.

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

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?

Evolution Loves Death More Than It Loves You Or Me. This Is Easy To Write, Easy To Read, And Hard To Believe.

We Wake, If We Ever Wake At All, To Mystery, Rumors Of Death, Beauty, Violence.

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.

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

Hone And Spread Your Spirit Till You Yourself Are A Sail, Whetted, Translucent, Broadside To The Merest Puff.

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.

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.

Geography Is The Key, The Crucial Accident Of Birth. A Piece Of Protein Could Be A Snail, A Sea Lion, Or A Systems Analyst, But It Had To Start Somewhere. This Is Not Science; It Is Merely Metaphor. And The Landscape In Which The Protein "starts" Shapes Its End As Surely As Bowls Shape Water.

Write About Winter In The Summer.

Nature's Silence Is Its One Remark, And Every Flake Of World Is A Chip Off That Old Mute And Immutable Block.

We Teach Our Children One Thing Only, As We Were Taught: To Wake Up. We Teach Our Children To Look Alive There, To Join By Words And Activities The Life Of Human Culture On The Planet

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

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.

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

If We Listened To Our Intellect, We’d Never Have A Love Affair... Or Go Into Business. You’ve Got To Jump Off Cliffs And Build Your Wings On The Way Down.

I Do Not So Much Write A Book As Sit Up With It, As A Dying Friend. I Hold Its Hand And Hope It Will Get Better.

[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.

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

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

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

It Should Surprise No One That The Life Of The Writer - Such As It Is - Is Colorless To The Point Of Sensory Deprivation. Many Writers Do Little Else But Sit In Small Rooms Recalling The Real World.

Every Day Is A God, Each Day Is A God, And Holiness Holds Forth In Time.

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.

The Universe Is Illusion Merely, Not One Speck Of It Real, And We Are Not Only Its Victims, Falling Always Into Or Smashed By A Planet Slung By The Sun-but Also Its Captives, Bound By The Mineral-made Ropes Of Our Senses.

We Are Most Deeply Asleep At The Switch When We Fancy We Control Any Switches At All.

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.

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.

Painters Work From The Ground Up. The Latest Version Of A Painting Overlays Earlier Versions, And Obliterates Them. Writers, On The Other Hand, Work From Left To Right. The Discardable Chapters Are On The Left.

When You Write, You Lay Out A Line Of Words. Soon You Find Yourself Deep In New Territory.

Finding Yourself

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

Like Everyone In His Right Mind, I Feared Santa Claus.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Write As If You Are Dying.

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.

The Irrational Haunts The Metaphysical.

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

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

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

I Cannot Cause Light; The Most I Can Do Is Try To Put Myself In The Path Of Its Beam. It Is Possible, In Deep Space, To Sail On Solar Wind. Light, Be It Particle Or Wave, Has Force: You Can Rig A Giant Sail And Go. The Secret Of Seeing Is To Sail On Solar Wind. Hone And Spread Your Spirit Till You Yourself Are A Sail, Whetted, Translucent, Broadside To The Merest Puff

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.

So The Midwest Nourishes Us [...] And Presents Us With The Spectacle Of A Land And A People Completed And Certain. And So We Run To Our Bedrooms And Read In A Fever, And Love The Big Hardwood Trees Outside The Windows, And The Terrible Midwest Summers, And The Terrible Midwest Winters [...]. And So We Leave It Sorrowfully, Having Grown Strong And Restless By Opposing With All Our Will And Mind And Muscle Its Simple, Loving, Single Will For Us: That We Stay, That We Stay And Find A Place Among Its Familiar Possibilities. Mother Knew We Would Go; She Encouraged Us.

What Is Important Is The Moment Of Opening A Life And Feeling It Touch--with An Electric Hiss And Cry--this Speckled Mineral Sphere, Our Present World.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The Mountains Are Great Stone Bells; They Clang Together Like Nuns. Who Shushed The Stars? There Are A Thousand Million Galaxies Easily Seen In The Palomar Reflector; Collisions Between And Among Them Do, Of Course, Occur. But These Collisions Are Very Long And Silent Slides. Billions Of Stars Sift Amont Each Other Untouched, Too Distant Even To Be Moved, Heedless As Always, Hushed. The Sea Pronounces Something, Over And Over, In A Hoarse Whisper; I Cannot Quite Make It Out. But God Knows I Have Tried.

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.

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.

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

We Still And Always Want Waking.

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

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

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.

Push It. Examine All Things Intensely And Relentlessly.

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.

Unless All Ages And Races Of Men Have Been Deluded By The Same Mass Hypnotist (who?), There Seems To Be Such A Thing As Beauty, A Grace Wholly Gratuitous.

You Are Wrong If You Think That You Can In Any Way Take The Vision And Tame It To The Page. The Page Is Jealous And Tyrannical; The Page Is Made Of Time And Matter; The Page Always Wins.

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.

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.

It Was Less Like Seeing Than Like Being For The First Time Seen, Knocked Breathless By A Powerful Glance.

Learn Punctuation; It Is Your Little Drum Set, One Of The Few Tools Oyu Have To Signal The Reader Where The Beats And Emphases Go. (if You Get It Wrong, Any Least Thing, The Editor Will Throw Your Manuscript Out.) Punctuation Is Not Like Musical Notation; It Doesn't Indicate The Length Of Pauses, But Instead Signifies Logical Relations. There Are All Sorts Of People Out There Who Know These Things Very Well. You Have To Be Among Them Even To Begin.

There Is No Whit Less Enlightenment Under The Tree By Your Street Than There Was Under The Buddha's Bo Tree. I Invite You To Go Sit Under That Tree By Your Street.

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.

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.

The Mind Itself Is An Art Object ... The Mind Is A Blue Guitar On Which We Improvise The Song Of The World.

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

The World Knew You Before You Knew The World.

Cruelty Is A Mystery, And A Waste Of Pain.

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

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

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

It Makes More Sense To Write One Big Book - A Novel Or Nonfiction Narrative - Than To Write Many Stories Or Essays. Into A Long, Ambitious Project You Can Fit Or Pour All You Possess And Learn.

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

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.

The Dedicated Life Is Worth Living. You Must Give With Your Whole Heart.

Nothing On Earth Is More Gladdening Than Knowing We Must Roll Up Our Sleeves And Move Back The Boundaries Of The Humanly Possible Once More.

There Was Only Silence. It Was The Silence Of Matter Caught In The Act And Embarrassed. There Were No Cells Moving, And Yet There Were Cells. I Could See The Shape Of The Land, How It Lay Holding Silence. Its Poise And Its Stillness Were Unendurable, Like The Ring Of The Silence You Hear In Your Skull When You're Little And Notice You're Living The Ring Which Resumes Later In Life When You're Sick.

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.

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.

In Literary History, Generation Follows Generation In A Rage.

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

The Gaps Are The Thing. The Gaps Are The Spirit's One Home, The Altitudes And Latitudes So Dazzlingly Spare And Clean That The Spirit Can Discover Itself Like A Once-blind Man Unbound. The Gaps Are The Clefts In The Rock Where You Cower To See The Back Parts Of God; They Are Fissures Between Mountains And Cells The Wind Lances Through, The Icy Narrowing Fiords Splitting The Cliffs Of Mystery. Go Up Into The Gaps. If You Can Find Them; They Shift And Vanish Too. Stalk The Gaps. Squeak Into A Gap In The Soil, Turn, And Unlock-more Than A Maple-universe.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The Universe Was Not Made In Jest But In Solemn Incomprehensible Earnest.

Out Of A Human Population On Earth Of Four And A Half Billion, Perhaps Twenty People Can Write A Book In A Year. Some People Lift Cars, Too. Some People Enter Week-long Sled-dog Races, Go Over Niagara Falls In A Barrel, Fly Planes Through The Arc De Triomphe. Some People Feel No Pain In Childbirth. Some People Eat Cars. There Is No Call To Take Human Extremes As Norms.

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.

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.

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

No, The Point Is Not Only Does Time Fly And Do We Die, But That In These Reckless Conditions We Live At All, And Are Vouchsafed, For The Duration Of Certain Inexplicable Moments, To Know It.

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.

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.

Spend The Afternoon. You Can't Take It With You.

I Am A Frayed And Nibbled Survivor In A Fallen World, And I Am Getting Along. I Am Aging And Eaten And Have Done My Share Of Eating Too.

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.

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

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

Aim For The Chopping Block. If You Aim For The Wood, You Will Have Nothing. Aim Past The Wood, Aim Through The Wood; Aim For The Chopping Block.

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.

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 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!

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.

The Pulitzer Is More Useful Than Meaningful.

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

I Know Only Enough Of God To Want To Worship Him, By Any Means Ready To Hand.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

All The Green In The Planted World Consists Of These Whole, Rounded Chloroplasts Wending Their Ways In Water. If You Analyze A Molecule Of Chlorophyll Itself, What You Get Is One Hundred Thirty-six Atoms Of Hydrogen, Carbon, Oxygen, And Nitrogen Arranged In An Exact And Complex Relationship Around A Central Ring. At The Ring's Center Is A Single Atom Of Magnesium. Now: If You Remove The Atom Of Magnesium And In Its Exact Place Put An Atom Of Iron, You Get A Molecule Of Hemoglobin. The Iron Atom Combines With All The Other Atoms To Make Red Blood, The Streaming Red Dots In The Goldfish's Tail.

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

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.

The World Is Wider In All Directions, More Dangerous And Bitter, More Extravagant And Bright. We Are Making Hay When We Should Be Making Whoopee; We Are Raising Tomatoes When We Should Be Raising Cain And Lazarus.

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.

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

We Live In All We Seek.

Nature Is, Above All, Profligate. Don't Believe Them When They Tell You How Economical And Thrifty Nature Is, Whose Leaves Return To The Soil. Wouldn't It Be Cheaper To Leave Them On The Tree In The First Place? This Deciduous Business Alone Is A Radical Scheme, The Brainchild Of A Deranged Manic-depressive With Limitless Capital. Extravagance! Nature Will Try Anything Once.

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

Just Think: In All The Clean, Beautiful Reaches Of The Solar System, Our Planet Alone Is A Blot; Our Planet Alone Has Death.

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

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.

You Empty Yourself And Wait, Listening. After A Time You Hear It: There Is Nothing There...you Feel The World's Word As A Tension, A Hum, A Single Chorused Note Everywhere The Same. This Is It: This Hum Is The Silence.

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.

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

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

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.

If I Actually Believed That The Progress Of Human Understanding Depended On Our Crop Of Contemporary Novelists, I Would Shoot Myself.

Your Freedom As A Writer Is Not Freedom Of Expression In The Sense Of Wild Blurting; You May Not Let Rip. It Is Life At Its Most Free, If You Are Fortunate Enough To Be Able To Try It, Because You Select Your Materials, Invent Your Task, And Pace Yourself.

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

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.

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.

We Wake, If Ever At All, To Mystery.

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.

I Wake Expectant, Hoping To See A New Thing.

We Are Here To Abet Creation And To Witness To It, To Notice Each Other's Beautiful Face And Complex Nature So That Creation Need Not Play To An Empty House.

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

There Is Neither A Proportional Relationship, Nor An Inverse One, Between A Writer’s Estimation Of A Work In Progress & Its Actual Quality. The Feeling That The Work Is Magnificent, & The Feeling That It Is Abominable, Are Both Mosquitoes To Be Repelled, Ignored, Or Killed, But Not Indulged.

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

There Is Always The Temptation In Life To Diddle Around Making Itsy-bitsy Friends And Meals And Journeys For Years On End. It Is All So Self Conscience, So Apparently Moral...but I Won't Have It. The World Is Wilder Than That In All Directions, More Dangerous...more Extravagant And Bright. We Are...raising Tomatoes When We Should Be Raising Cain, Or Lazarus.

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.

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.

Why Are We Reading, If Not In Hope Of Beauty Laid Bare, Life Heightened And Its Deepest Mystery Probed?

Our Family Was On The Lunatic Fringe. My Mother Was Always Completely Irrepressible. My Father Made Crowd Noises Into A Microphone.

Our Life Is A Faint Tracing On The Surface Of Mystery, Like The Idle Curved Tunnels Of Leaf Miners On The Face Of A Leaf. We Must Somehow Take A Wider View, Look At The Whole Landscape, Really See It, And Describe What's Going On Here. Then We Can At Least Wail The Right Question Into The Swaddling Band Of Darkness, Or, If It Comes To That, Choir The Proper Praise.

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

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.

Trees Have A Curious Relationship To The Subject Of The Present Moment. There Are Many Created Things In The Universe That Outlive Us, That Outlive The Sun, Even, But I Can't Think About Them. I Live With Trees.

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

According To Inuit Culture In Greenland, A Person Possesses Six Or Seven Souls. The Souls Take The Form Of Tiny People Scattered Throughout The Body.

The Sensation Of Writing A Book Is The Sensation Of Spinning, Blinded By Love And Daring. It Is The Sensation Of A Stunt Pilot's Turning Barrel Rolls, Or An Inchworm's Blind Rearing From A Stem In Search Of A Route. At Its Worst, It Feels Like Alligator Wrestling, At The Level Of The Sentence.

You Have To Take Pains In A Memoir Not To Hang On The Reader's Arm, Like A Drunk, And Say, 'and Then I Did This And It Was So Interesting.

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.

I Would Like To Live. . . Open To Time And Death Painlessly, Noticing Everything, Remembering Nothing, Choosing The Given With A Fierce And Pointed Will.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I Cannot Cause Light; The Most I Can Do Is Try To Put Myself In The Path Of Its Beam.

I Like To Be Aware Of A Book As A Piece Of Writing, And Aware Of Its Structure As A Product Of Mind, And Yet I Want To Be Able To See The Represented World Through It. I Admire Artists Who Succeed In Dividing My Attention More Or Less Evenly Between The World Of Their Books And The Art Of Their Books . . . So That A Reader May Study The Work With Pleasure As Well As The World That It Describes.

It Is The Fixed That Horrifies Us, The Fixed That Assails Us With The Tremendous Force Of Mindlessness. The Fixed Is A Mason Jar,and We Can't Beat It Open. ...the Fixed Is A World Without Fire--dead Flint, Dead Tinder, And Nowhere A Spark. It Is Motion Without Direction, Force Without Power, The Aimless Procession Of Caterpillars Round The Rim Of A Vase, And I Hate It Because At Any Moment I Myself Might Step To That Charmed And Glistening Thread.

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 Way You Live Your Days Is The Way You Live Your Life.

I Don't Know What It Is About Fecundity That So Appalls. I Suppose It Is The Teeming Evidence That Birth And Growth, Which We Value, Are Ubiquitous And Blind, That Life Itself Is So Astonishingly Cheap, That Nature Is As Careless As It Is Bountiful, And That With Extravagance Goes A Crushing Waste That Will One Day Include Our Own Cheap Lives.

You Can Serve Or You Can Sing, And Wreck Your Heart In Prayer, Working The World's Hard Work.

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

I Woke In Bits, Like All Children, Piecemeal Over The Years. I Discovered Myself And The World, And Forgot Them, And Discovered Them Again.

Put Yourself Out Of Your Misery.

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.

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

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.

Almost All Of My Many Passionate Interests, And My Many Changes Of Mind, Came Through Books. Books Prompted The Many Vows I Made To Myself.

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.

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