An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [101]
All spring long I crawled on my pin. I was reading General Semantics—Alfred Korzybski’s early stab at linguistics; I’d hit on it by accident, in books with the word “language” in their titles. I read Freud’s standard works, which interested me at first, but they denied reason. Denying reason had gotten Rimbaud nowhere. I read without snobbery, excited and alone, wholly free in the indifference of society. I read with the pure, exhilarating greed of readers sixteen, seventeen years old; I felt I was exhuming lost continents and plundering their stores. I knocked open everything in sight—Henry Miller, Helen Keller, Hardy, Updike, and the French. The war novels kept coming out, and so did John O’Hara’s. I read popular social criticism with Judy and Ellin—The Ugly American, The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers. I thought social and political criticism were interesting, but not nearly so interesting as almost everything else.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, excited me enormously. Emerson was my first crack at Platonism, Platonism as it had come bumping and skidding down the centuries and across the ocean to Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson was a thinker, full time, as Pasteur and Salk were full-time biologists. I wrote a paper on Emerson’s notion of the soul—the oversoul, which, if I could banish from my mind the thought of galoshes (one big galosh, in which we have our being), was grand stuff. It was metaphysics at last, poetry with import, philosophy minus the Bible. And Emerson incited to riot, flouting every authority, and requiring each native to cobble up an original relation with the universe. Since rioting seemed to be my specialty, if only by default, Emerson gave me heart.
Enervated, fanatic, filled long past bursting with oxygen I couldn’t use, I hunched skinny in the school’s green uniform, etiolated, broken, bellicose, starved, over the back-breaking desk. I sighed and sighed but never emptied my lungs. I said to myself, “O breeze of spring, since I dare not know you, / Why part the silk curtains by my bed?” I stuffed my skull with poems’ invisible syllables. If unauthorized persons looked at me, I hoped they’d see blank eyes.
On one of these May mornings, the school’s headmistress called me in and read aloud my teachers’ confidential appraisals. Madame Owens wrote an odd thing. Madame Owens was a sturdy, affectionate, and humorous woman who had lived through two world wars in Paris by eating rats. She had curly black hair, rouged cheeks, and long, sharp teeth. She swathed her enormous body in thin black fabrics; she sat at her desk with her tiny ankles crossed. She chatted with us; she reminisced.
Madame Owens’s kind word on my behalf made no sense. The headmistress read it to me in her office. The statement began, unforgettably, “Here, alas, is a child of the twentieth century.” The headmistress, Marion Hamilton, was a brilliant and strong woman whom I liked and respected; the school’s small-minded trustees would soon run her out of town on a rail. Her black hair flared from her high forehead. She looked up at me significantly, raising an eyebrow, and repeated it: “Here, alas, is a child of the twentieth century.”
I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t know what to do about it. You got a lot of individual attention at a private school.
My idea was to stay barely alive, pumping blood and exchanging gases just enough to sustain life—but certainly not enough so that anyone suspected me of sentience, certainly not enough so that I woke up and remembered anything—until the time came when I could go.
C’est elle, la petite morte, derrière les rosiers…
It is she, the little dead girl, behind the rose bushes…
the child left on the jetty washed out to sea,
the little farm child following the