Suppose we answer the most important question of existence in the affirmative. Only one question remains: How will we live this life?
Despite all the mental and emotional technologies we've invented to find the answer – philosophy and poetry, scriptures and self-help – life stares at us silently, big and indifferent, helping us with disapproving thumbs and crippling us with self-awareness that makes us just plain dissatisfied. Beneath the excess of a hundred billion synapses, the overthinking animal continues to lose its way in the wilderness of want.
Not so with other animals. “They do not sweat and cry about their condition,” wrote Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass (which is philosophy and poetry and literature and self-help in one), “those who lie awake in the dark and cry for their sins, I do not get sick talking about their work to God, no one is dissatisfied, no one loses his sense of possessions.”
A century and a half after Whitman, Annie Dillard looks to another animal for a model of how these human lives can be lived. After unknowingly allowing a muskrat to be his teacher, he recounts his encounter with the spotted weasel in an essay published in his 1982 collection of revelations. Teaching the Talking Stonelater it was included Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New (public library) — one of my favorite books of all time.
You write:
I was startled and he scared me, we looked at each other from a distance.
Twenty minutes from my house, in the woods near the quarry and across the highway, there is Hollins Pond, a remarkable shallow place, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk. Hollins Pond is also called Murray's Pond; it includes two acres of bottomland along Tinker Creek with six inches of water and six thousand lily pads. In winter, the brown and white wagons stop between them, just to wet their hooves; from the far shore they look like a miracle itself, complete with the indifference of a miracle. Now, in the summer, the carts are gone. Water lilies have bloomed and spread across the green horizontal plane of terra firma to plodding blackbirds, and quaking roofs to black leeches, crab and carp.
This, remember, is suburbia. It's a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though there's nothing to be seen here. There's a 55 mph freeway at one end of the lake, and a pair of nesting wood ducks at the other. Under every forest is a muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods, fields and woods, connected everywhere by motorcycle tracks – wild terrapins lay their eggs.
So, I crossed the highway, jumped over a small barbed wire fence, and gratefully followed the motorcycle path through the wild rose and poison ivy along the lake shore and up into the tall grass fields. Then I cut through the woods until I came to a fallen tree where I live. This tree is very beautiful. It forms a dry, upholstered bench at the end of the upper, marshy lake, a freeway raised on a jagged shore between the shallow blue water and the deep blue sky.
The sun went down. I was free from the trunk of the tree, locked in a lap of lichen, looking at the lily pads at my trembling feet and parting in a dream over the pushing path of the carp. A yellow bird appeared on the right and flew behind me. It caught my eye; I turned around – and suddenly, mysteriously, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.
Weasel! I had never seen the wild before. He was ten inches tall, thin as a curve, a ribbon of muscles, brown as fruit wood, soft fur, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed like a poor man; he would make a good arrow. There was just a speck of chin, maybe two brown hairs, and then the pure white fur that stretched beneath him. He had two black eyes that I didn't see, just like you see a window.
Encounters are events, they affect things in us, they change things in us, they bend possibilities as they may be, they bind time and chance into a knot of meaning between two beings. Dillard recounts:
Umnuke was surprised and kept quiet as he came out from under a wild rose tree four meters away. To my surprise, it was quiet and I turned back to the trunk of the tree. Our eyes are closed, and someone lost the key.
Our view was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, meet unexpectedly on a crowded road when each is thinking of something else: a clear blow to the gut. It was also a light stroke in the brain, or a sudden stroke of the brain, with all the charging and a nearby grate of crushed balloons. It emptied our lungs. He cut down the forest, shook the fields, and drained the water from the lake; the world scattered and fell into that dark eye socket. When you and I looked at each other like that, our skulls would split and fall on our shoulders. But we don't. We keep our skulls. So.
Every meaningful encounter is some kind of magic – it comes unbidden and breaks without warning, leaving us changed. As the fox disappears under the wild rose, Dillard finds himself wondering what life is like for a creature “whose newspaper is clay tracks, feather spray, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, untied, loose leaf, and blown,” and what clues that life might give him about his own way of life. Reflecting on the memory of the meeting, in your revelation, he writes:
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular—should I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the tracks of my hands? – but I might learn something from the absurdity, something about the purity of physical life and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The lion lives by necessity and we live by choice, it hates necessity and dies in the end ignorant of its gifts. I would like to live as I should, as the canal lives as it should. And I suspect that for me the path is like that of a snake: open to time and death without pain, seeing everything, remembering nothing, choosing what is given with a brutal and direct will.
Because we are creatures made of time, changing our way of life is changing our experience of time. Looking at wild chronometry:
Time and events just poured in, unmarked, and directly entered, like blood entering my gut through a jugular vein.
It is difficult enough for one to achieve such purity of character, it is even more difficult to share it with another. In a passage that for me is the purest, highest measure of love – the love of another, the love of life – he writes:
Can two live that way? Is it possible for two to live under the wild rose, and explore by the lake, so that the smooth mind of each is everywhere in the other, and as accepted and unchallenged, as falling snow?
We can, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even silence—by choice. The thing is to follow your calling in a certain skillful and soft way, to find a soft and live place and connect to that pulse. This is enabling, not fighting. A weasel does not “attack” anything; the crocodile lives as it is meant to, allowing at all times the complete freedom of one need.
I think it would be good, and right, and obedient, and innocent, to hold your one need and not let it go, to sink into it limping wherever it takes you. Then even in death, wherever you go or however you live, you will not be separated. Hold it, lift you up high, until your eyes burn and fall; let your musky flesh be torn to pieces, and let your bones be loose and scattered, loosed in the fields, fields, and forests, easily, thoughtlessly, from any height, from above like eagles.
For more lessons on how to be someone taken from the lives of other animals, read about time and compassion in the donkey, about love and loss of the orca, and living with the plasticity of being from the caracara.
