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Authors: Annie Dillard

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AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD
WAKING UP WILD

WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE TO BE ALIVE?
Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed.

Can you breathe here? Here where the force is greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face? Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where maples grow straight and their leaves lean down. For a joke you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!

It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are
alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.

Who turned on the lights? You did, by waking up: You flipped the light switch, started up the wind machine, kicked on the flywheel that spins the years. Can you catch hold of a treetop, or will you fly off the diving planet as she rolls? Can you ride out the big blow on the trunk of a coconut palm till the winds let up and you fall back asleep? You do, you fall asleep again, and you slide in a dream to the palm tree's base; the winds die off, the lights dim, the years slip away as you idle there till you die in your sleep, till death sets you cruising.

Knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you—rear, kick, and try to throw you—while you hang on to the ring. It is riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping. Or, conversely, you step aside from the dreaming fast loud routine and feel time as a stillness about you, and hear the silent air ask in so thin a voice, Have you noticed yet that you will die? Do you remember, remember, remember? Then you may feel your life as a weekend, a weekend you cannot extend.

When I was fifteen, I felt it coming; now I was sixteen, and it hit.

My feet had been set imperceptibly on a new path, a fast path into a long tunnel like those many turnpike tunnels near Pittsburgh, turnpike tunnels whose entrances bear on brass plaques a roll call of the men who died blasting them. I wandered witlessly forward and found myself going down, and saw the light dimming; I adjusted to the slant and dimness, traveled farther down, adjusted to greater dimness, and so on. There wasn't a whole lot I could do about it, or about anything. I was going to hell on a handcart, that was all, and I knew it and everyone around me knew it, and there it was.

I was growing and thinning, as if pulled. I was getting angry, too, as if pushed. I morally disapproved of most things in North America, and blamed my innocent parents for them. My feelings deepened and lingered. The swift moods of early childhood—each formed by and suited to its occasion—vanished. Now feelings lasted so long they left stains. They arose from nowhere, like winds or waves, and battered me or engulfed me.

When I was angry, I felt myself coiled and longing to kill someone or bomb something big. One winter, trying to appease myself, I whipped my bed every afternoon with my uniform belt. I despised the spectacle I made in my own eyes—whipping the bed with a belt, like a creature demented!—and I often began halfheartedly, but I
did it daily, after school, as a desperate discipline, trying to rid myself of my wildness.

Sometimes in class I couldn't stop laughing; things were too funny to be borne. It began then, my surprise that no one else saw what was so funny.

I read some few books with such reverence I didn't close them at the finish, but only moved the pile of pages back to the start, without breathing, and began again. I read one such book, an enormous novel, six times that way—closing the binding between sessions, but not between readings.

On the piano in the basement I played the maniacal “Poet and Peasant Overture” so loudly, for so many hours, night after night, I damaged the piano's keys and strings. When I wasn't playing this crashing overture, I played boogie-woogie, or something else, anything else, in octaves—otherwise, it wasn't loud enough. My fingers were so strong I could do push-ups with them. I played one piece with my fists. I banged on a steel-stringed guitar till I bled, and once, on a particularly great rock-and-roll downbeat, I broke straight through one of Father's snare drums.

I loved my boyfriend so tenderly, I thought I'd transmogrify into vapor. It would take spectroscopic analysis to locate my molecules in thin air. No way of holding him was close enough. Nothing could cure this bad case
of gentleness except, perhaps, violence: if he swung me by the legs, maybe, and split my skull on a tree? Would that ease this insane wish to kiss too much his eyelids' outer corners and his temples, as if I could love up his brain?

I envied people in books who swooned. For two years I felt myself continuously swooning and continuously unable to swoon. The blood drained from my face and eyes and flooded my heart; my hands emptied, my knees unstrung, I bit at the air for something worth breathing—but I failed to fall, and I couldn't find the way to black out. I had to live on the lip of a waterfall, exhausted.

When I was bored I was first hungry, then nauseated, then furious and weak. “Calm yourself,” people had been saying to me all my life. Since early childhood I had tried one thing and then another to calm myself, on those few occasions when I truly wanted to. Eating helped; singing helped. Now sometimes I truly wanted to calm myself. I couldn't lower my shoulders; they seemed to wrap around my ears. I couldn't lower my voice, although I could see the people around me flinch. I waved my arm in class till the teachers themselves wanted to kill me.

I was what they called a live wire. I was shooting out sparks that were digging a pit all around me, and I was sinking into that pit. Laughing with Ellin at school
recess, or driving around after school with Judy in her jeep, exultant, or dancing with my boyfriend to Louis Armstrong across a polished dining-room floor, I got so excited I looked around wildly for aid. I didn't know where I should go or what I should do with myself. People in books split wood.

When rage reappeared, or boredom, it seemed never to have left. Each so filled me with so many years' intolerable accumulation, it jammed the space behind my eyes so I couldn't see. There was no room left to live. My rib cage was so tight I couldn't breathe. Every cubic centimeter of atmosphere above my shoulders and head was heaped with last straws. I couldn't peep, I couldn't wiggle or blink; my blood was too mad to flow.

For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unself-conscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn't remember how to forget myself. I didn't want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else—but swerve as I might, I couldn't avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn't hush.

So this was adolescence. Was this how the people around me had died on their feet—inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the sun for so many years the world shriveled around them, and when at last their inescapable orbits had passed through these dark egoistic years, it was too late; they had adjusted.

Must I then lose the world forever, that I had so loved? Was it all, the whole bright and various planet, where I had been so ardent about finding myself alive, only a passion peculiar to children, that I would outgrow even against my will?

AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD
OLD STONE PRESBYTERIAN

I QUIT THE CHURCH
. I wrote the minister a fierce letter. The assistant minister, kindly Dr. James H. Blackwood, called me for an appointment. My mother happened to take the call.

“Why,” she asked, “would he be calling you?” I was in the kitchen after school. Mother was leaning against the pantry door, drying a crystal bowl.

“What, Mama? Oh. Probably,” I said, “because I wrote him a letter and quit the church.”

“You—what?” She began to slither down the doorframe, weak-kneed, like Lucille Ball. I believe her whole life passed before her eyes.

As I climbed the stairs after dinner I heard her moan to Father, “She wrote the minister and quit the church.”

“She—what?”

Father knocked on the door of my room. I was the only person in the house with a solitary room. Father ducked
under the doorway, entered, and put his hands in his khakis' pockets.

“Hi, Daddy.”

Actually, it drove me nuts when people came in my room. Mother had come in just last week. My room was getting to be quite the public arena. Pretty soon they'd put it on the streetcar routes. Why not hold the US Open here? I was on the bed, in uniform, trying to read a book. I sat up and folded my hands in my lap.

I knew that Mother had made him come—“She listens to you.” He doubtless had been trying to read a book too.

Father looked around, but there wasn't much to see. My rock collection was no longer in evidence. A framed tiger swallowtail, slightly askew on its white cotton backing, hung on a yellowish wall. On the mirror I'd taped a pencil portrait of Rupert Brooke looking off softly. He looked like my boyfriend. Balanced on top of the mirror were some yellow-and-black
FALLOUT SHELTER
signs, big aluminum ones that my friends had collected as part of their antiwar efforts. On the pale maple desk there were, among other books and papers, an orange thesaurus, a blue three-ring binder with a boy's name written all over it in every typeface, a green assignment notebook, and Emerson's
Essays.

Father began with some vigor: “What was it you
said in this brilliant letter?” At my silence he went on: Didn't I see? That people did these things—quietly? Just—quietly? No fuss? No flamboyant gestures. No uncalled-for letters. He was forced to conclude that I had deliberately set out to humiliate Mother and him.

“And your poor sisters too!” Mother added feelingly from the hall outside my closed door. She must have been passing at that very moment.

Just then we all heard a hideous shriek ending in a wail; it came from my sisters' bathroom. Had Molly cut off her head? It set us all back a moment—me on the bed, Father standing by my desk, Mother outside the closed door—until we all realized it was Amy, mad at her hair. Like me, Amy was undergoing a trying period, years long; she, on her part, was mad at her hair. She screeched at it wherever she was, the sound carrying all over the house, and it terrified all the rest of us, every time.

The assistant minister of the Shadyside Presbyterian Church, Dr. Blackwood, and I had a cordial meeting in his office. He was an experienced, calm man in a three-piece suit; he had a mustache and wore glasses. After he asked me why I had quit the church, he loaned me four volumes of C. S. Lewis's broadcast talks for a paper I was writing. Among the volumes proved to be
The Problem of Pain,
which I would find fascinating, not quite
serious enough, and much too short. I had already written a paper on the Book of Job. The subject scarcely seemed to be closed. If the all-powerful creator directs the world, then why all this suffering? Why did the innocents die in the camps, and why do they starve in the cities and farms? Addressing this question, I found thirty pages written thousands of years ago, and forty pages written in 1955. They offered a choice of fancy language saying, “Forget it,” or serenely worded, logical-sounding answers that so strained credibility (pain is God's megaphone) that “Forget it” seemed in comparison a fine answer.

BOOK: The Abundance
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