An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [69]
I hated insects; that I knew. Fingering insects was touching the rim of nightmare. But you have to study something. I never considered turning away from them just because I was afraid of them.
I liked their invisibility; they did not matter, so they did not exist. People’s nervous systems edited out the sight of insects before it reached their brains; my seeing insects let me live alongside human society in a different sensory world, just as insects themselves do. That I collected specimens at the country-club pool pleased me; I did not really mind that my friends turned bilious when I showed them my prizes. I loved the sport of catching butterflies; they took bad hops, like aerial grounders. (I did not know then that the truly athletic, life-loving entomologists study dragonflies, which are fantastically difficult to catch—fast, sharp-eyed, hard to outwit.) Cringing, I taught myself to paralyze butterflies through the net, holding them lightly at the thorax as Gene Stratton Porter had done. I brought them out of the net and let them fly away—lest they fall on me dead later.
How confidently I had overlooked all this—rocks, bugs, rain. What else was I missing?
I opened books like jars. Here between my hands, here between some book’s front and back covers, whose corners poked dents in my palm, was another map to the neighborhood I had explored all my life, and fancied I knew, a map depicting hitherto invisible landmarks. After I learned to see those, I looked around for something else. I never knew where my next revelation was coming from, but I knew it was coming—some hairpin curve, some stray bit of romance or information that would turn my life around in a twinkling.
I INTENDED TO LIVE the way the microbe hunters lived. I wanted to work. Hard work on an enormous scale was the microbe hunters’ stock-in-trade. They took a few clear, time-consuming steps and solved everything. In those early days of germ theory, large disease-causing organisms, whose cycles traced straightforward patterns, yielded and fell to simple procedures. I would know just what to do. I would seize on the most casual remarks of untutored milkmaids. When an untutored milkmaid remarked to me casually, “Oh, everyone knows you won’t get the smallpox if you’ve had the cowpox,” I would perk right up.
Microbe Hunters sent me to a biography of Louis Pasteur. Pasteur’s was the most enviable life I had yet encountered. It was his privilege to do things until they were done. He established the germ theory of disease; he demonstrated convincingly that yeasts ferment beer; he discovered how to preserve wine; he isolated the bacillus in a disease of silkworms; he demonstrated the etiology of anthrax and produced a vaccine for it; he halted an epidemic of cholera in fowls and inoculated a boy for hydrophobia. Toward the end of his life, in a rare idle moment, he chanced to read some of his early published papers and exclaimed (someone overheard), “How beautiful! And to think that I did it all!” The tone of this exclamation was, it seemed to me, astonished and modest, for he had genuinely forgotten, moving on.
Pasteur had not used up all the good work. Mother told me again and again about one of her heroes, a doctor working for a federal agency who solved a problem that arose in the late forties. Premature babies, and only premature babies, were turning up blind, in enormous numbers. Why? What do premature babies have in common?
“Look in the incubators!” Mother would holler, and knock the side of her head with the heel of her hand, holler outraged, glaring far behind my head as she was telling me this story, holler, “Look in the incubators!” as if at her wit’s end facing a roomful of doctors who wrung their useless hands and accepted this blindness as one of life’s tough facts. Mother’s hero, like all of Mother’s heroes, accepted nothing. She rolled up her sleeves, looked in the incubators, and decided to see