Annie Dillard and Seeing

 If passing people say anything when they see me reading while I walk, it’s usually to ask me how I’m capable of such bizarre behavior or to tell me I have a gift or some such thing. But every once in a while, someone asks, “Why aren’t you enjoying the beautiful day?” Really?! Just outright judgment? One woman pointed to the trees above us as she asked the question; I took her gesture to mean that the proper way for civilized humans to fulfill the categorical imperative known as “enjoying the day” is to stare constantly at the leaves. I am enjoying the day when I walk. I’m out experiencing the light, the temperature, the fresh air, the exercise, and the endorphin rush. And I do look up from my book from time to time to catch a tree or a bird or a squirrel or a weed or a rock. Or a curb. After all, the idea of walking while reading for the ADD brain is that it limits the booming shouts of the periphery for attention; it doesn’t eliminate them altogether.

These days, my morning constitutional usually involves a stroll along the parkway skirting the north border of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. And I feel really good about concentrating on a book while walking along at the feet of grandeur and not, you know, guilty at all or anything. Lately, I’ve been reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which – and I find I’m not alone in this at all – reminds me of Thoreau’s Walden. And when she talks about taking a stroll every morning to the creek to look at frogs and fish and insects and grass and wildflowers, I keep looking at her book while walking by my lovely mountain stream, and I suppress the irony without any difficulty at all. Because the conflict only pops up in my mind two or three times every sentence.

But then I remember that Thoreau’s heir entitled one early chapter, “Seeing,” and I have to confess that the guilt catches up to me. (I’ve never been one to run very fast from that particular huntsman.) She talks about relearning to interpret what she sees in order to catch things that ordinary people miss. I, on the other hand, don’t see any eggsacs on tree trunks; I don’t usually even see the tree trunks. She describes the experiences of people born blind who receive sight through medical procedures and then outlines her own attempts to see the flat patches of color the newly sighted report. The patches at the corner of my eye may technically seem flat, but only because they’re at the corner of my eye and not in the center of my vision. No, I spend my time walking along the woods with my nose in a book – a book that tells me to point my nose at the woods.

OK, Guilt, fair enough. But now let me present my defense, paltry though it may seem (at first). As Dillard explains it, the point is not to let the previous training of your eyes dictate what your mind engages with. She even mentions mystics who teach the ADD in all of us to acknowledge the constant distracting chatter of the senses and mind and to look “above” the noise with both active commitment and passive receptiveness. Well, while I walk, I engage with the mountains in my own way. I take in the colors of the leaves, the sound of the water rushing over rocks, and the feeling of the negative ions producing extra seratonin, and I make these the foundation above which I look with intention. And these mornings, what I see above that horizon are Dillard’s ideas.