When you read a book once every thirty years, you’re
bound to notice different things with each reading.
During that first read of An American Childhood by Annie Dillard all those years ago, I
remember being fascinated by her introduction to the natural world, broken open
by her discovery of the library.
“The Field
Book of Ponds and Streams was a shocker form beginning to end,” she writes.
“Where – short of robbing a museum – might a fifth-grade student at the Ellis
School on Fifth Avenue obtain such a legendary item as a wooden bucket?”
This time
around I was more attuned to Dillard’s awareness of the spiritual.
“It was not surprising, really, that I alone in this
church knew what the barefoot Christ, if there had been such a person, would
think about things –grape juice, tailcoats, British vowels, sable stoles.”
As she looks around the congregation of her 1960s
Pittsburgh Presbyterian church, Dillard wonders if people are just pretending to pray. Aptly,
she evokes her experience of the natural world to describe some new stirring within.
“I was alert enough now to feel, despite myself,
some faint, thin stream of spirit braiding forward from the pews. Its flawed
and fragile rivulets pooled far beyond me at the altar.”
As for the next reading thirty years from now?
I
imagine the scenes featuring her grandmother Oma will resonate the most: “the
expression on her thin lips was sometimes peevish, sometimes doting.”
