Perspectives

"Terror and beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small" (27).

I haven't always been the biggest Dillard fan, but over the years I've come to realize that it's been more of a clash of stylistic preferences than ideas. While this reading in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek starts off much the same way as Teaching a Stone to Talk, I tried to unpack the big ideas that Dillard is trying to convey instead of focusing on her scattered observations.

The above quote is what grabbed my attention, and while reading I closed my eyes and imagined taking part in my own experiment. Seems that, without my consent, Dillard's plain yet detailed recounting of her pond-water project had made me envision every little detail as if I were sitting at my own kitchen table, peering into a bowl of murky water, staring at the thin film of unsuspecting amoebas for hours. Then Dillard suggests putting the amoebas into an aquarium and imagines them contemplating their known universe as a rectangular tank, and mentions, "But it could be that we are not seeing something. Galileo thought comets were an optical illusion" in what seems like a completely disjointed thought. But it's not! We could be nothing more than amoebas, seeing for ourselves what we think we know for a fact, when in reality all our assurances don't amount to much. Reading this passage and thinking about all of us humans sitting on this floating rock out in space (which might very well be the celestial equivalent of a two-feet by five aquarium) I was suddenly aware that what I had once viewed as Dillard's scatterbrained retellings and lonely observations had just taken me out of the little comfort zone of my perceived consciousness. Damn, I thought. She got me, all right.

So what to do with this gained insight? Keep it close? Meditate on it every day, constantly putting myself in an amoeba's perspective again? When I walk around town and feel my cheeks going numb under the constant push of a frozen November breeze, that's not what I'm thinking about. The thing is, none of us will ever know for sure the reality of anything we think we understand. My current beliefs dictate that, first and foremost, we have nothing to do but experience the world we've been born into. So when I walk I listen to distant cars and trees and spend some time trying to "see" the way Dillard wants to see things, but I keep my infinite tininess and the path of my limited existence in time in the back of my mind, because I want to appreciate what's in front of me. Dillard quotes Donald E. Carr remarking on single-celled organisms which aren't hard-wired for brains:

"This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is" (21).

Sure, this fact is mournful on some levels, but can you think about what our human existence would be like if we did experience the universe as it really is? How boring! I feel like this is the idea that Dillard is trying to wrestle with. We have been blessed with the gift of an infinite number of mysteries, an infinite number of scenarios with which we can keep ourselves occupied, trying to make sense of it all. We should appreciate that, and go to any length to convey that awareness to others. If we don't, we all might as well just be amoebas in a china bowl.