Pilgrimaging

My favorite teacher in high school was Mr. Friedman, my AP English teacher. He's the closest I ever got to having a teacher like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, and he actually did get up on a desk and recite, "O Captain, My Captain." He also did a ton of other crazy things, like donning a black cape and reading "The Raven" by candlelight. He was like a walking library, and he always talked in this grand tone of voice as if literature were meant to be spoken of only with great reverence. He had this way of pronouncing every word as if it deserved better than to be merely a word. Whenever I hear the word "pilgrimage," I think of him, because he pronounced it "pil-gri-MAHJ." So I always hear his voice saying that word.

I thought of the word a lot while reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This is a book that I fully intend to read again because no matter how slowly I read it, I didn't feel as if I was absorbing near as much as it had to offer. This book is a gift, and more than deserves the Pulitzer Prize it won in 1974. It isn't a story, and it isn't exactly a memoir. I suppose it's a collection of essays, but it doesn't exactly read like that either. It's more or less a journal of Dillard's observations. But she is so much more than an observer. She stakes out the titular creek, near her home in Virginia, and sees in its movement and its creatures ever metaphor for the spiritual that has ever been devised. I kept thinking as I was reading, oh. I should underline that. And then somehow I wouldn't have a pen handy and before I knew it I was three pages later thinking the same thing.

I did manage to grab a pencil and underline this: "I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking moment saying hello to ourselves." Wow. This may be the truest statement I've ever read. The theme of the book that I love the most is her constant effort to lose herself. She spends hours eye to eye with insects in the grass, stalking muskrats, and staring at the pods of praying mantis eggs trying to become so absorbed by the outside world that she no longer remembers herself. I think that is why I love being in nature so much, and why most people do. At a certain point you are so swept up in the present-ness of what you are seeing, you forget that there is a past and a future and anything to worry about or decide, and then you are gone with all of that. It doesn't take much more than the ocean or a 14,000-foot peak to remind you that you don't matter very much.

It is so hard to have this kind of self-unconsciousness in a city. The city creates nothing but a greater consciousness of self. You are constantly aware of who and where you are relative to thousands of other people, and it is your very substance that takes up the pulsing space. I started to think about how I might lose myself even in the midst of this. I want to go to the park (when it's warm) and find a bird's nest, and totally tune out myself and everyone else, and stare at that nest until something happens. I was talking to some friends at church last week and we were commenting how much we like it when friends come visit because sometimes we just don't want to hang out with our New York friends (i.e. each other) anymore. And I think that's because my New York friends exhaust me sometimes. The standard here is constant movement, working all the time, competition, and those who stop to breathe are lazy or unmotivated. I wonder if that's why I don't want to go to grad school, because something in me just says, you know what, just because everyone around me is doing it ALL, I really don't want to be a part of that.

Anyway. This book is a total masterpiece and it made me want to pilgrimage myself. I don't know how to do that, since the place I live in could not be more opposite from Tinker Creek. But I want to start seeing and hearing the way she does, and I want to stop working so much. Despite the fact that all she seems to do is wander around in the woods, I think she is much more accomplished than I am.

Song In My Head: "Michelle" - the Beatles. Jason Castro is my favorite on American Idol. I was just saying to my mom, maybe Jason will sing my song. And then he did.