Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation exhibition of one of the most prestigious art schools in New York, among beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was impressed when I saw project after project continue as its subject the least lasting, most false aspect of human life: the self. Where was Iris Murdoch in the lives of these budding artists to remind them that art, at its highest level, is “an opportunity to ignore yourself”? And yet who could be wrong: Not only their generation, but our entire culture seems to have forgotten that identity and ideas are the most interesting parts of people – waves in the ocean of the soul, shiny but shallow, full of every wind blowing, insignificant in the depths.
I was suddenly reminded of Annie Dillard's essay from her 1974 masterpiece Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (public library), which won him a Pulitzer Prize and which I revisit regularly as essential soul watering. Its subject is Dillard's experience “trapping” a muskrat in Tinker Creek. Its purpose — like that of Annie Dillard's story, of any great story — is what life is all about.
An era before it was thought that any fragment of the self could immediately face the global mirror of millions, that any experience could be photographed and at the same time become not its “memorial” (as Italo Calvino put it) but the transformation of an inner world sold by popularity, Dillard writes:
Forty minutes I watched [the muskrat]he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all.
[…]
I didn't even know I was there. For those forty minutes last night I was as sensitive and still as a picture plate; I got the impressions, but didn't print the captions. My self-awareness had disappeared; now it seems that, if I had electrodes, my EEG would be low. I've done this sort of thing so often that I've lost track of myself with slow walks and sudden stops; it's second nature to me now. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is very empowering. I wonder if we don't waste a lot of our energy by spending every waking minute greeting ourselves.
After some passages that combine Heraclitus and Heisenberg in a clever way that makes the piece a symphony of thought and feeling, Dillard goes on to quote Martin Buber quoting an old Kabbalah teacher:
When you walk through the fields your mind is pure and holy, then from every stone, and every plant that grows, and every animal, the sparks of their soul come out and stick to you, then they are purified and become a holy fire for you.
Ten years later, I'm speaking in the wonderful Portland area Literary Arthe held this passage up as his favorite in his entire book. But I find his words clarifying, sanctifying:
It's amazing how many people can't, or won't, keep quiet. I could not, nor would I, hold myself still for thirty minutes inside, but in the river I slowed down, in the middle, empty.
Long before neuroscience revealed how such moments quiet the workings of the Default Mode Network and put us in a state called “soft euphoria,” Dillard describes that state internally:
I am not happy; my breathing is slow and normal. In my mind I don't say, Muskrat! Muskrat! There! I don't say anything. If I have to hold a position, I “don't hold back.” If I freeze, I close my muscles, I will get tired and break. Instead of being strong, I walk calmly. I focus on the ground wherever I am; I find balance and relax. I retreat—not within myself, but without myself, to become nerve tissue. Whatever I see is abundant, abundant. I am the skin of the water and the wind plays; I am a petal, a feather, a stone.
This, perhaps, is what Willa Cather meant in her perfect definition of happiness as “melting into something complete and vast” that “comes as naturally as sleep” – the dissolution of the self into the Absolute, or what the Transcendentalist queen Margaret Fuller called “The Whole” in her beautiful account of one such a century and a half earlier. This, too, is the wonderful truth at the heart of Dillard's oft-quoted insight — a case, today — that “how we spend our days is, in fact, how we spend our lives.”
Put together this little piece of endless soul-slaking Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Loren Eiseley – one of humanity's greatest essayists – on the muskrat and the meaning of life, then revisit Hermann Hesse on finding the soul beneath the self and Annie Dillard's classic meditation on the meaning of life found in a total solar eclipse.
