An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [90]
Week after week, year after year, after art class I walked the vast museum, and lost myself in the arts, or the sciences. Scientists, it seemed to me as I read the labels on display cases (bivalves, univalves; ungulates, lagomorphs), were collectors and sorters, as I had been. They noticed the things that engaged the curious mind: the way the world develops and divides, colony and polyp, population and tissue, ridge and crystal. Artists, for their part, noticed the things that engaged the mind’s private and idiosyncratic interior, that area where the life of the senses mingles with the life of the spirit: the shattering of light into color, and the way it shades off round a bend. The humble attention painters gave to the shadow of a stalk, or the reflected sheen under a chin, or the lapping layers of strong strokes, included and extended the scientists’ vision of each least thing as unendingly interesting. But artists laid down the vision in the form of beauty bare—Man Walking—radiant and fierce, inexplicable, and without the math.
It all got noticed: the horse’s shoulders pumping; sunlight warping the air over a hot field; the way leaves turn color, brightly, cell by cell; and even the splitting, half-resigned and half-astonished feeling you have when you notice you are walking on earth for a while now—set down for a spell—in this particular time for no particular reason, here.
AS A CHILD I READ HOPING TO LEARN everything, so I could be like my father. I hoped to combine my father’s grasp of information and reasoning with my mother’s will and vitality. But the books were leading me away. They would propel me right out of Pittsburgh altogether, so I could fashion a life among books somewhere else. So the Midwest nourishes us (Pittsburgh is the Midwest’s eastern edge) 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 the forested river valleys with the blue Appalachian Mountains to the east of us and the broad great plains to the west. 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.
I had awakened again, awakened from my drawing and reading, from my exhilarating game playing, from my intense collecting and experimenting, and my cheerful friendships, to see on every side of me a furious procession of which I had been entirely unaware. A procession of fast-talking, keen-eyed, high-stepping, well-dressed men and women of all ages had apparently hoisted me, or shanghaied me, some time ago, and were bearing me breathless along I knew not where. This was the startling world in which I found that I had been living all along. Packed into the procession, I pedaled to keep up, but my feet only rarely hit the ground.
The pace of school life quickened, its bounds tightened, and a new kind of girl emerged from the old. The old-style girl was obedient and tidy. The new-style girl was witty and casual. It was a small school, twenty in a class. We all knew who mattered, not only in our class but in the whole school. The teachers knew, too.
In summer we girls commonly greeted each other, after a perfunctory hello, by extending our forearms side by side to compare tans. We were blond, we were tan, our teeth were white and straightened, our legs were brown and depilated, our blue eyes glittered pale in our dark faces; we laughed; we shuffled the cards fast and dealt four hands. It was not for me. I hated it so passionately I thought my shoulders and arms, swinging at the world, would split off from my body