I recently enjoyed rereading Edwin Way Teale's A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm, about 40 years after having first encountered it. Reviews of that book compared it to this one, so now I've had my first encounter with Annie Dillard. Herewith some excerpts from her Pulitzer Prize-winning book:
"James Houston describes two young Eskimo girls sitting cross-legged on the ground, mouth on mouth, blowing by turns each other's throat cords, making a low, unearthly music." (p. 26)
"Ladybugs hibernate under shelter in huge orange clusters sometimes the size of basketballs. Out west, people hunt for these... they take them down to warehouses in the valleys, which pay handsomely.... They're mailed in the cool of night in a boxes of old pine cones. It's a clever device: How do you pack a hundred living ladybugs? The insects naturally crawl deep into the depths of the pine cones; the sturdy "branches" of the opened cones protect them through all the bumpings of transit." (p. 79-80)
"“There are seven or eight categories of phenomena in the world that are worth talking about, and one of them is the weather. Any time you care to get in your car and drive across the country and over the mountains, come into our valley, cross Tinker Creek, drive up the road to the house, walk across the yard, knock on the door and ask to come in and talk about the weather, you’d be welcome.” (p. 83)
"I allow the spiders the run of the house. I figure that any predator that hopes to make a living on whatever smaller creatures might blunder into a four-inch square bit of space in the corner of the bathroom where the tub meets the floor, needs every bit of my support." (p. 84)
“Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.”(p. 106)
"This is salamander metropolis. If you want to find a species wholly new to science and have your name inscribed Latinly in some secular version of an eternal rollbook, then your best bet is to come to the southern Appalachians, climb some obscure and snakey mountain where, as the saying goes, "the hand of man has never set foot," and start turning over rocks." (p. 174)
"Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in sull summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day." (p. 179)
"If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin." (p. 200) Despite my science background, I had to look it up. The similarity is truly remarkable - and understandable in functional terms:
"The average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees Fahrenheit. (p. 203)
"There are, for instance, two hundred twenty-eight separate and distinct muscles in the head of an ordinary caterpillar." (p. 209) ["I seem to possess an organ that others lack, a sort of trivia machine"]
"Certainly nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe…” (p. 229)
"The experimenters studied a single grass plant, winter rye. They let it grow in a greenhouse for four months; then they gingerly spirited away the soil—under microscopes, I imagine—and counted and measured all the roots and root hairs. In four months the plant had set forth 378 miles of roots—that's about three miles a day—in 14 million distinct roots. This is mighty impressive, but when they get down to the root hairs, I boggle completely. In those same four months the rye plant created 14 billion root hairs, and those little things placed end to end just about wouldn't quit. In a single cubic inch of soil, the length of the root hairs totaled 6000 miles." (p. 258)
"The egg of a parasite chalcid fly, a common small fly, multiplies unassisted, making ever more identical eggs. The female lays a single fertilized egg in the flaccid tissues of its live prey, and that egg divides and divides. As many as 2000 new parasitic flies will hatch to feed on the host's body with identical hunger. Similarly—only more so—Edwin Way Teale reports that a lone aphid, without a partner, breeding "unmolested" for one year, would produce so many living aphids that, although they are only a tenth of an inch long, together they would extend into space 2500 light-years." (p. 263)
"They [Eskimos] eat fish, goose or duck eggs, fresh meat, and anything else they an get, including fresh "salad" of greens still raw in a killed caribou's stomach and dressed with the delicate acids of digestion." (p. 287)
"The sentence in Teale is simple: "On cool autumn nights, eels hurrying to the sea sometimes crawl for a mile or more across dewy meadows to reach streams that will carry them to salt water." These are adult eels, silver eels, and this descent that slid down my mind is the fall from a long spring ascent the eels made years ago. As one-inch elvers they wriggled and heaved their way from the salt sea up the coastal rivers of America and Europe, upstream always unto "the quiet upper reaches of rivers and brooks, in lakes and ponds--sometimes as high as 8,000 feet above sea level." There they had lived without breeding "for at least eight years." In the late summer of the year they reached maturity, they stopped eating, and their dark color vanished. They turned silver; now they are heading to the sea..." (p. 345)
I always enjoy when authors use words that are unfamiliar to me:
"...a low hill trembling in yellow brome..." A type of grass; directly from the Greek word bromos = oat.
"... clearly I had better be scrying the signs." From Middle English to look into the future as with a crystal ball.
"... a sycamore's primitive bark is not elastic but frangible..." Able to be broken, fragile. Often used for things that are intentionally breakable, as light poles on highways.
"... the waves are translucent, laving, roiling with beauty like sharks." Washing; related to laundry and lavatory.
"A bobwhite who is still calling in summer is lorn..." Doomed, lost, lonely. More often seen as forlorn.
",,, salvifically, I hope, it seems bold." Related to salvation. Related to salvage.
"... it was a maple key, a single winged seed from a pair." From context a fruit with a wing - but why?
"... convection currents hauling round the world's rondure where they must..." Roundness (French)
"The snakeskin had unkeeled scales..." Obviously without a keel, generating a smooth surface, cf garter snakes which have keeled (rough) skin.
This was an interesting book, and an enjoyable read. Like Teale, whom she quotes frequently, she excels at observation. But her writing style incorporates more metaphysical aspects of the why behind events.
Phrase: "Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you." Or: "You see the creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you're gone... I think that the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at the door."
For the TLDR crowd who just want a taste of the book, I would recommend Chapter 10 ("Fecundity") and Chapter 13 ("The Horns of the Altar"), but I think not the more famous Chapter 15 ("The Waters of Separation"), which was a bit too metaphysical for my taste. If your copy has an "Afterword to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition," that's worth reading. Also any "about the author" section.
I'm sure many readers of this blog are quite familiar with Annie Dillard. Please chime in with your comments and recommendations re her other books.
