It’s January, and I’ve been thinking about seeing.
It seems an appropriate time to take a peek back at Annie Dillard:
It’s January, and I’ve got great plans. I’ve been thinking about seeing.
It occurs to me that it’s fitting that I should have been so taken with her writing—she writes as an ethnographer of the natural world, much like Emerson in his thinking that the Poet’s life should be pitched to the key where the smallest natural occurrences are striking and stunning and inspirational. She is the keenest of observers, looking for the invisible in the everyday, the transparent suspended in the air, the unexpected penny on the sidewalk. The natural made visible and explained, its hidden patterns followed, mapped, unfurled in words—the project of the poet naturalist and ethnographer alike.
Except, of course, that a frog or a leaf care little if you insinuate yourself in their lives, extract their secrets, and return home to write about it in the search of (academic) fame and glory. Sure, she let a moth die in a flame and got a chapter loved and loathed by grade schoolers staggering under the weight of their Norton readers out of it—but really, Dillard has it easy in the ethics department.
But still, the lesson is, I think, that my private personal ramblings should be committed to paper more often, because there’s less and less of a membrane separating the personal from the professional as I continue down this path. What an odd profession I have chosen…
