Quotable: The Backdrop

By Annie Dillard in The Maytrees, a novel. Her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is one of my all-time favorites. It's an unusual memoir in that it is not 'about' her but concerned almost entirely with her passionate observer's encounter with the mystery and significance of life's intricacies that most humans tend to overlook. (And are therefore, in my opinion, missing out.) I didn't realize she wrote fiction as well. Good stuff.

From the first few pages:

"The Maytrees' lives, like the Nausets',* played out before the backdrop of fixed stars. The way of the world could be slight, then and now, but rarely, among individuals, vicious. The slow heavens marked hours. They lived often outside. They drew every breath from a wad of air just then crossing from saltwater to saltwater. Their sandspit was a naked strand between two immensities, both given to special effects. Twice a day behind their house the tide boarded the sand. Four times a year the seasons flopped over. Clams live like this, but without so much reading."

* The Nausets are a Native American people who used to live on Cape Cod where the story takes place.

From the last few pages:

"In her last years Lou puzzled over beauty, over the tide slacked holding its breath at the flood. She never knew what to make of it. Certainly nothing in Darwin, in chemical evolution, in optics or psychology or even cognitive anthropology gave it a shot. Having limited philosophy's objects to certainties, Wittgenstein later realized he broke, in however true a cause, his favorite toy, metaphysics, by forbidding it to enter anywhere interesting. For the balance of Wittgenstein's life he studied, of all things, religions. Philosophy, Lou thought and so did Cornelius, had trivialized itself right out of the ballpark."