Category Archives: Annie Dillard

a bent cover

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img_1408Don’t you hate when this happens to one of your books?

I ordered May Sarton‘s Plant Dreaming Deep online.  I was excited as I was pulling the book out of the padded envelope…only to find it had made its entire journey with the bottom right corner folded back.  Aaaagh!  I immediately pressed it back into place.  Weighted it down with other books.  A day later, no improvement.  I admit I had thoughts of giving this book away and ordering another copy.  But I got hold of myself–another lesson that nothing is ever perfect–then took hold of that bent cover, opened the book, and began to read.

Another confession:  In the past, whenever I heard the title of the book, I thought of a plant that was dreaming.  Never once did I consider that the reader was being encouraged to plant dreaming deep.  But before I even arrived at the first page of the book, I came upon the epigraph, four lines of one of Sarton’s poems where a man who has been out roaming comes home “Seasoned and stretched to plant his dreaming deep.”

May Sarton

Polly Thayer's portrait of May Sarton owned by the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University

Plant Dreaming Deep is May Sarton’s memoir about settling down in a house in the village of Nelson, about two hours from Boston, for the stated purpose of rescuing her parents’ Belgian furniture from the cellar in which it was being stored.  She was in her early 50′s.

After a load of firewood is dumped in her yard, she and a visiting friend set about making order out of disorder.  Afterwards she writes, ”There is something very satisfying about a well-stacked cord of wood on a back porch.”

She writes about how supportive a routine is, that “the spirit moves around freely in it.”  Just as Annie Dillard writes about a schedule  as “a net for catching days.”

Plant Dreaming Deep is the story of May Sarton’s house, her garden, and her village, what she calls “a tangible reality outside myself, against which I could prove almost everything I had come to believe.”  It was published in 1968.

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a gathering place

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On NPR, on September 20th, I heard David Sedaris say that he was no different than anyone else except that he kept a notebook in his pocket.  He noticed and he recorded.  In the May 8, 2006 issue of the New Yorker, he wrote:  “For the past ten years or so, I’ve made it a habit to carry a small notebook in my front pocket. The model I favor is called the Europa, and I pull it out an average of ten times a day, jotting down grocery lists, observations, and little thoughts on how to make money, or torment people.”

In Writing Toward Home, Georgia Heard writes, “A notebook is a gathering place, a portfolio of thoughts and fragments…What moves me to write one thing and not another is the point…My notebook is a constant weight in my already-too-heavy black bag…Its presence always reminds me I’m a writer, and it helps me live a considered life that doesn’t spin by focused only on groceries, dinner, and car repairs.”

This is a gathering place.  Where reading and writing and life come together.  Words from the notebook I keep in my purse linked to a favorite passage or book…Looking up from a passage and attaching it to a moment… Writing here makes me more aware of all three.  Why is it we write one thing and not another?

Is a day full of breakfasts and pants left on the floor and haircuts so thin that it slips through the net, impossible to catch?  One way to find meaning is to notice.  Another to record.  I should let the groceries and the haircuts fall through but take the time to fatten up at least one moment so that it has enough meaning to catch.  I can swell an hour with the thoughts of someone who lived a lifetime ago.  Take a minute to see the red leaf that wasn’t there yesterday.  Pause a second with the white tail of a deer as he jumps the hedge.

Dillard writes that we should “labor with both hands at sections of time.”  Some days it takes both hands.

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the day itself

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On Monday, February 26, 1951, John Steinbeck wrote,

“I don’t understand why some days are wide open and others are closed off, some days smile and others have thin slitted eyes and others still are days which worry.  And it does not seem to be me but the day itself.” 

Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

Is this wishful thinking by John Steinbeck?  For surely, it is me.  And not the day itself.  Usually, I have plans for my days–scaffolding, Annie Dillard would say.  Certain things I always do on Monday–exercise.  A particular thing I want to do this Monday–work on my new novel.  And then there’s the email, the phone call, the car that won’t start, the brain that won’t work.  What if the scaffolding comes tumbling down on top of me?  Well, then I can use tape or glue to force it back up or I can pause for a minute to see if a new shape might be emerging from the pieces.

Every day that John Steinbeck worked on the first draft of East of Eden, from January 29 to November 1, 1951, he began the day by writing a letter to his editor, who was also his friend.  For anyone beginning or in the middle of a novel or any other long project, this book is proof that day by day, it can be done.

catching days

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In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard writes of schedules as nets for “catching days.”  She says, “I have been looking into schedules.”  Then she describes the schedule of a Danish aristocrat living a hundred years ago, who started his day by getting out of bed at four to hunt grouse, woodcock and snipe.   Wallace Stevens in his forties woke at six to read for two hours.  I long to be an early riser.  Yet, on most days, it takes an alarm to pull me out of bed at seven. 

Annie Dillard also writes, “There is no shortage of good days.  It is good lives that are hard to come by…a life spent reading–that is a good life.”  Today I’m reading Saving Agnes by Rachel Cusk.  It was the 1993 Winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award.  Unfortunately the Whitbread Awards have gone the way of stadiums and are now referred to as the Costa Book Awards, as in the coffee. 

That is something I’m aspiring to, by the way.  A first novel.  More specifically, a published first novel.

But back to Saving Agnes, so far my favorite moment is when Agnes is talking to her friend Greta about a weird man, which sends Agnes into her head–one of my favorite places for a character to be.  Agnes thinks, “There was another world beneath the surface of the one she chose each day, a dark labyrinth of untrodden paths.  Its proximity frightened her.  She wondered if she would ever lose her way and wander into it.”

I spend so much time in my head.  The trick, it seems, is how to push what’s in there to the surface.

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