from an american childhood by annie dillard

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. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling! And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly backup, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. 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. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. If you can find them they shift and vanish too. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. One of her earliest memories is being afraid of a monster in her room as a five. Her life milestones aren’t marked by social events so much as key events that evoke a learning experience upon her learning experiences that usher her into a new stage of mental and emotional maturity. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. The novel is also a bildungsroman of Annie Dillard.

“Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.

From an american childhood by annie dillard