An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [65]
Even my friends began to seem to me marvelous: Judy Schoyer laughing shyly, her round eyes closed, and quick Ellin Hahn, black-haired and ruddy, who bestrode the social world like a Colossus, saying always just the right and funny thing. Where had these diverse people come from, really? I watched little Molly turn from a baby into a child and become not changed so much as ever more herself, kindhearted, nervous, both witty and humorous: was this true only in retrospect? People’s being themselves, year after year, so powerfully and so obliviously—what was it? Why was it so appealing? Personality, like beauty, was a mystery; like beauty, it was useless. These useless things were not, however, flourishes and embellishments to our life here, but that life’s center; they were its truest note, the heart of its form, which drew back our thoughts repeatedly.
Somewhere between one book and another a child’s passive acceptance had slipped away from me also. I could no longer see the world’s array as a backdrop to my private play, a dull, neutral backdrop about which I had learned all I needed to know. I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it. I peered in one day, stepped in the next, and soon wandered in deep over my head. Month after month, year after year, the true and brilliant light, and the complex and multifaceted coloration, of this actual, historical, waking world invigorated me. Its vastness extended everywhere I looked, and precisely where I looked, just as forms grew under my gaze as I drew.
This was the enthusiasm of a child, like that of a field-working scientist, and like that of the artist making a pencil study. One took note; one took notes. The subject of the study was the world’s things: things to sort into physical categories, and things to break down into physical structures.
I was not to discover literature and ideas for a few more years. All I had awakened to was the world’s wealth of information. I was reading books on drawing, painting, rocks, criminology, birds, moths, beetles, stamps, ponds and streams, medicine. (Somehow I missed those other childhood mainstays, astronomy, coins, and dinosaurs.) How I wished I could find agreeable books on thin air! For everything, I had gathered, was something. And for me, during those few years before I vanished into a blinded rage, everything was interesting.
Nothing could be less apparently interesting, for example, than a certain infuriatingly dull sight I always looked at with hatred. It was raining and Mother was driving us along one of Pittsburgh’s clogged narrow highways. I looked out through the rain on the window and saw by the roadside the raw cuts the road builders carved through the rolling rocky hills, carved long dreary decades ago, to lay the road. Blasting bores scarred these banks of sandstone and shale in streaks; gritty rain streamed down their cut faces and dissolved the black soot and coal dust and car exhaust. The car stopped and started. I stared dully through the spotted windshield. Gray rivulets poured down the rock, mile after highway mile, and puddled at the berm where the rock met the winter-killed grass and mud.
This sight slew me in my seat. It was so dull it unstrung me, so I could barely breathe. How could I flee it, the very landscape, the dull rock, the bleak miles, the dark rain? I slumped under the weight of my own passive helplessness. Sometimes I memorized billboards. I tried traveling with my eyes closed, and that