An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [103]
Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil. I could see the oaks turning brown on the edge of the hockey field, and see the scoured silver sky above shining a secret, true light into everything, into the black cars and red brick apartment buildings of Shadyside glimpsed beyond the trees. Pretty soon all twenty of us—our class—would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I’d been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other’s socks. I thought, unfairly, of the Polyphemus moth crawling down the school’s driveway. Now we’d go, too.
Back in my seat, I repeated the poem that began, “We grow to the sound of the wind playing his flutes in our hair.” The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking syllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world.
I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. “For the English department,” she told me. William Golding was then writer in residence; before him was Enid Starkie, who wrote the biography of Rimbaud. But, “To smooth off her rough edges,” she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly.
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. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?
I was in no position to comment. We had visited the school; it was beautiful. It was at the foot of Virginia’s Great Valley, where the Scotch-Irish had settled in the eighteenth century, following the Alleghenies south.
Epilogue
A DREAM CONSISTS OF LITTLE MORE than its setting, as anyone knows who tells a dream or hears a dream told:
We were squeezing up the stone street of an Old World village.
We were climbing down the gangway of an oceangoing ship, carrying a baby.
We broke through the woods on the crest of a ridge and saw water; we grounded our blunt raft on a charred point of land.
We were lying on boughs of a tree in an alley.
We were dancing in a darkened ballroom, and the curtains were blowing.
The setting of our urgent lives is an intricate maze whose blind corridors we learn one by one—village street, ocean vessel, forested slope—without remembering how or where they connect in space.
You travel, settle, move on, stay put, go. You point your car down the riverside road to the blurred foot of the mountain. The mountain rolls back from the floodplain and hides its own height in its trees. You get out, stand on gravel, and cool your eyes watching the river move south. You lean on the car’s hot hood and look up at the old mountain, up the slope of its green western flank. It is September; the golden-rod is out, and the asters. The tattered hardwood leaves darken before they die. The mountain occupies most of the sky. You can see where the route ahead through the woods will cross a fire scar, will vanish behind a slide of shale, and perhaps reemerge there on that piny ridge now visible across the hanging valley—that ridge apparently inaccessible, but with a faint track that fingers its greenish spine. You don’t notice starting to walk; the sight of the trail has impelled you along it, as the sight of the earth moves the sun.
Before you the mountain’s body curves away backward like a gymnast; the mountain’s peak is somewhere south, rolled backward, too, and out of sight. Below you lies the pale and widening river; its far bank is forest now, and hills, and more blue hills behind them, hiding the yellow plain. Overhead and on the