Seeing.doc
Seeing
Annie Dillard
(from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, HarperPerennial, 1974)
When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of
my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been
seized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk
up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off
piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block,
draw huge a
ows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled
the a
ows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this
a
ow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way,
egardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight
home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again
y the impulse to hide another penny.
It is still the first week in January, and I’ve got great plans. I’ve been thinking about seeing. There
are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and
strewn with pennies cast
oadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets
excited by a mere penny? If you follow one a
ow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a
tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kid paddling from
its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty
indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if
you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make you
day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a
lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.
I used to be able to see flying insects in the air. I’d look ahead and see, not the row of hemlocks
across the road, but the air in front of it. My eyes would focus along that column of air, picking
out flying insects. But I lost interest, I guess, for I dropped the habit. Now I can see birds.
Probably some people can look at the grass at their feet and discover all the crawling creatures. I
would like to know grasses and sedges—and care. Then my least journey into the world would be
a field trip, a series of happy recognitions. Thoreau, in an expansive mood, exulted, “What a rich
ook might be made about buds, including, perhaps, sprouts!” It would be nice to think so. I
cherish mental images I have of three perfectly happy people. One collects stones. Another—an
Englishman, say—watches clouds. The third lives on a coast and collects drops of seawater which
he examines microscopically and mounts. But I don’t see what the specialist sees, and so I cut
myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the various forms of happiness.
Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t affair. A fish flashes, then
dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into
heaven; the
ightest oriole fades into leaves. These disappearances stun me into stillness and
concentration; they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision
that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven
veils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal: now-you-don’t-see-it, now-you-do. For a week
last September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the
ack of the house. One day I went out to investigate the racket; I walked up to a tree, an Osage
orange, and a hundred birds flew away. They simply materialized out of the tree. I saw a tree,
then a whisk of color, then a tree again. I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds took
flight. Not a
anch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparently weightless as well as invisible.
Or, it was as if the leaves of the Osage orange had been freed from a spell in the form of red-
winged blackbirds; they flew from the tree, caught my eye in the sky, and vanished. When I
looked again at the tree the leaves had reassembled as if nothing had happened. Finally I walked
directly to the trunk of the tree and a finally hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, and
vanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? The Osage orange,
unruffled, looked just as it had looked from the house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirds
cried from its crown. I looked downstream where they flew, and they were gone. Searching, I
couldn’t spot one. I wandered downstream to force them to play their hand, but they’d crossed the
creek and scattered. One show to a customer. These appearances catch at my throat; they are the
free gifts, the
ight coppers at the roots of trees.
It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that
are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a
ze
a, and a boot? Specialists can find the most incredibly well-hidden things. A book I read
when I was young recommended an easy way to find caterpillars to rear: you simply find some
fresh caterpillar droppings, look up, and there’s your caterpillar. More recently an author advised
me to set my mind at ease about those piles of cut stems on the ground in grassy fields. Field
mice make them; they cut the grass down by degrees to reach the seeds at the head. It seems that
when the grass is tightly packed, as in a field of ripe grain, the blade won’t topple at a single cut
through the stem; instead, the cut stem simply drops vertically, held in the crush of grain. The
mouse severs the bottom again and again, the stem keeps dropping an inch at a time, and finally
the head is low enough for the mouse to reach the seeds. Meanwhile, the mouse is positively
littering the field with its little piles of cut stems into which, presumably, the author of the book is
constantly stumbling.
If I can’t see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open. I’m always on the lookout fo
antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These
things are utterly common, and I’ve not seen one. I bang on hollow trees near water, but so far no
flying squi
els have appeared. In flat country I watch every sunset in hopes of seeing the green
ay. The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurting fountain
at the moment of sunset; it throbs into the sky for two seconds and disappears. One more reason
to keep my eyes open. A photography professor at the University of Florida just happened to see
a bird die in midnight; it jerked, died, dropped, and smashed on the ground. I squint at the wind
ecause I read Stewart Edward White: “I have always maintained that if you looked closely
enough you could see the wind—the dim, hardly-made-out, fine de
is fleeing high in the air.”
White was an excellent observer, and devoted an entire chapter of The Mountains to the subject
of seeing deer: “As soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificial
obvious, then you too will see deer.”
But the artificial obvious is hard to see. My eyes account for less than one percent of the weight
of my head; I’m bony and dense; I see what I expect. I once spent a full three minutes looking at a
ullfrog that was so unexpectedly large I couldn’t see it even though a dozen enthusiastic
campers were shouting directions. Finally I asked, “What color am I looking for?” and a fellow
said, “Green.” When at last I picked out the frog, I saw what painters are up against: the thing
wasn’t green at all, but the color of wet hickory bark.
The lover can see, and the knowledgeable. I visited an aunt and uncle at a quarter-horse race in
Cody, Wyoming. I couldn’t do much of anything useful, but I could, I thought, draw. So, as we
all sat around the kitchen table after supper, I produced a sheet of paper and drew a horse. “That’s
one lame horse,” my aunt volunteered. The rest of my family joined in: “Only place to saddle that
one is his neck”; “Looks like we better shoot the poor thing, on account of those te
ible
growths.” Meekly, I slid the pencil and paper down the table. Everyone in that family, including
my three young cousins, could draw a horse. Beautifully. When the paper came back it looked as
though five shining, real quarter horses had been co
alled by mistake with a papier-mâché
moose; the real horses seemed to gaze at the monster with a steady, puzzled air. I stay away from
horses now, but I can do a creditable goldfish. The point is that I just don’t know what the love
knows; I just can’t see the artificial obvious that those in the know construct. The herpetologist
asks the native, “Are there snakes in that ravine?” “Nosir.” And the herpetologist comes home
with, yessir, three bags full. Are there butterflies on that mountain? Are the bluets in bloom, are
there a
owheads here, or fossil shells in the shale?
Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that
comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many
animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my
knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my
ain. Donald E. Ca
points out that
the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the
ain: “This is philosophically
interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the