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Annie Dillard on How to Live With Mystery, the Two Ways of Looking, and the Secret of Seeing

Jan 10, 2024, 6 min read

Annie Dillard on How to Live With Mystery, the Two Ways of Looking, and the Secret of Seeing

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Highlights

  • An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold (View Highlight)
  • It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks … are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection (View Highlight)
  • Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise. (View Highlight)
  • Dillard returns to the elusive art of seeing in our everyday lives. In a sentiment that calls to mind what cognitive scientists now know about attention and Mary Oliver’s piercing assertion that “attention without feeling is only a report,” she considers the two ways of seeing:

    Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it. (View Highlight)

  • But when we allow ourselves this letting go, when we let shadow and light permeate our willful blindness, the warmth of illumination washes over us and leaves us transformed. “Something broke and something opened,” Dillard writes of one such transcendent moment in which she let herself experience this second kind of seeing (View Highlight)
  • The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. (View Highlight)
  • But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise… I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff (View Highlight)

title: “Annie Dillard on How to Live With Mystery, the Two Ways of Looking, and the Secret of Seeing” author: “Maria Popova” url: ”https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/04/annie-dillard-pilgrim-at-tinker-creek-seeing/” date: 2023-12-19 source: reader tags: media/articles

Annie Dillard on How to Live With Mystery, the Two Ways of Looking, and the Secret of Seeing

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

  • An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold (View Highlight)
  • It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks … are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection (View Highlight)
  • Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise. (View Highlight)
  • Dillard returns to the elusive art of seeing in our everyday lives. In a sentiment that calls to mind what cognitive scientists now know about attention and Mary Oliver’s piercing assertion that “attention without feeling is only a report,” she considers the two ways of seeing:

    Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it. (View Highlight)

  • But when we allow ourselves this letting go, when we let shadow and light permeate our willful blindness, the warmth of illumination washes over us and leaves us transformed. “Something broke and something opened,” Dillard writes of one such transcendent moment in which she let herself experience this second kind of seeing (View Highlight)
  • The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. (View Highlight)
  • But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise… I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff (View Highlight)

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