I went to work this morning at four thirty in the morning, life as usual M-F. After I complete the fifteen minute commute I drag myself from the car into the drab warehouse where toilet paper, mops, and chemical compounds that could cause cancer fill my day. I get to the coffee maker and get the last four quick pumps of… with a shudder ….Seattle’s “best”. I clean the bathrooms both the front and rear pairs of them in under an hour, then comes relief. I love having an IPOD. What would I do without it? As I start my ritual of taking out the garbage I put on my headphone, I say headphone because I only have one ear bud, so better to quickly remove it, usually to stop and talk to someone or when my boss comes around. But now comes escape into the world of Narnia, Middle Earth, The Battle of Gettysburg, or the lecture hall of Sproul, Dobson, Zacharias, and the like. I lose myself and my intellect is gorging on the feast before me. On Friday of last week I started a book by Annie Dillard called “The Maytrees” which I picked off of my Dad’s Audible.com account. I had no idea what i was in store for, in the hands of Dillard my imagination was overwhelmed with moving descriptions of shacks in the sand, relations that are deep and complex, and ageless wisdom as if uttered by a sage of old. Listening to the ending of the story while I was buffing out imperfections from the shop floor i was bombarded with moments when, I don’t know if you have had them, but moments of “huh”. You know what I am taking about when you are reading a book or listening to someone speak and you are enlightened or maybe you are in agreement with the statement, whatever you want to call it, Dillard crafts these moments well into the end of her story.
I hope you have an outlet like I have with my adventures into the world of literature. I am having an experience like one I had in Colorado that I will have to write about another time, where upon seeing the mountains of my youth, my father’s youth, and my grandfather’s youth as if for the first time, it awakened something in my soul, this too is what Annie Dillard and others have done for me as of late.
(by the way those mountains I speak of are the ones at the top of this page, “Mystic Mountains” i call them)
April 15, 2008 at 2:08 am |
I have those moments too except with my poetry class. I love your description of escaping into the world of literature.
April 15, 2008 at 3:52 pm |
My first expereince with Annie Dillard was reading her pulitzer prize winning non-fiction “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” I developed an crush on her at that time. When she wrote the book she was 27 or so. She found out that she had wond the pulitzer while playing a softball game.
There is something so unpretentious about that.
Becareful with your reading Cole. You might find that you will be held accountable for the knowledge you gain. There is a reason many of our society don’t read. One reason is that they are lazy. Another reason is that they are passive. But a more insidious reaon is that they have a subconscious belief that if they knew something they would have to do something about what they know.
Your grandfather told me years ago: You will be the same person five years from now as you are today but for the people you meet and the books you read.
Read on son!