The Abundance. Annie Dillard
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and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up from the shadow that crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax—stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away and her heaving mouth parts cracked like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that remained was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax—a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle’s round pool.
And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.
She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wet at my feet.
And that is why I believe those hollow crisps on the bathroom floor are moths. I think I know moths, and fragments of moths, and chips and tatters of utterly empty moths, in any state. How many of you, I asked the people in my long-ago class, how many of you want to give your lives and be writers? I was trembling from coffee, or cigarettes, or the closeness of faces all around me. (Is this what we live for? I thought; is this the only final beauty: the color of any skin in any light, and living, human eyes?) All hands rose to the questions. (You, Nick? Will you? Margaret? Randy? Why do I want them to mean it?) And then I tried to tell them what the choice must mean: You can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax. . . . They had no idea what I was saying. (I have two hands, don’t I? And all this energy, for as long as I can remember. I’ll do it in the evenings, after skiing, or on the way home from the bank, or after the children are asleep . . .) They thought I was raving again. It’s just as well.
I have three candles here on the table which I free from the plants and light when visitors come. The cat usually avoids them, although once she came too close and her tail caught fire; I rubbed it out before she noticed. The flames move light over everyone’s skin, draw light to the faces of my friends. When the people leave I never blow the candles out and after I’m asleep they flame and burn.
The Cascade range, in these high latitudes, backs almost into the water. There is only a narrow strip before it, an afterthought of foothills and farms sixty miles wide. The mountains wall well. The rest of the country—most of the rest of the planet, in some real sense, excluding a shred of British Columbia’s coastline and the Alaskan islands—is called, and profoundly felt to be, simply “East of the Mountains.” I’ve been there.
I came here to study hard things—rock mountain and salt sea—and to temper my spirit on their edges. These mountains—Mount Baker and the Sisters and Shuksan, the Canadian Coastal Range and the Olympics on the Peninsula—are surely the edge of the known and comprehended world. They are high. That they bear their own unimaginable masses and climates aloft, holding them up in the sky for anyone to see plain, makes them only more mysterious for their very visibility and absence of secrecy. They are the western rim of the real, if not considerably beyond it. If the Greeks had looked at Mount Baker all day, would their large and honest art not have cracked? Would they not have gone fishing, as these people do? As perhaps I one day shall.
But the mountains are, incredibly, east. When I first came here I faced east and watched the mountains, thinking, These are the Ultima Thule, the final westering, the last serrate margin of time. And since they are, incredibly, east of me, I must be no place at all. But the sun rose over the snowfields and woke me where I lay, and I rose and cast a shadow over someplace, and thought: There is, God help us, more. So gathering my bowls and spoons, and turning my head, as it were, I moved to face west, relinquishing all hope of sanity, for what is more.
What was more is islands: sea, and unimaginably solid islands, and more sea, and a hundred rolling skies. You spill your breath. Nothing holds; the whole show rolls. I can imagine Virginias no less than Pacifics. Inland valley, pool, desert, plain—it’s all a falling sheaf of edges, like a quick-flapped deck of cards, like a dory or a day launched all unchristened, lost at sea. Land is a poured thing and time a surface lapping and fringeing at fastness, at a hundred hollow and receding blues. Breathe fast: We’re backing off the rim.
Here is the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam. The salt sea and the islands, molding and molding, row upon rolling row, don’t quit; nor do winds end nor skies cease from spreading in curves. The actual percentage of land mass to sea in Puget Sound equals that of the rest of the planet. We have less time than we knew. Time is eternity’s pale interlinear, as the islands are the sea’s. We have less time than we knew and that time buoyant and cloven, lucent, and missile, and wild.
The room where I live is plain as a skull, a firm setting for windows. A nun lives in the fires of the spirit, a thinker lives in the bright wick of the mind, an artist lives jammed in the pool of materials. But this room is a skull, a fire tower, wooden, and empty. Of itself it is nothing, but the view, as they say, is good.
Since I live in one room, one long wall of which is glass, I am myself, at everything I do, a backdrop to all the landscape’s occasions, all its weathers, colors and lights. From the kitchen sink, and from my bed, and from the table, couch, hearth, and desk, I see land and water, islands, sky.
The land is complex and shifting; the eye leaves it. There is a white Congregationalist church among Douglas firs; there is a green pasture between two yellow fallow fields; there are sheep bent over below some alders, and beside them a yard of brown hens. But everything in the landscape points to sea. The land’s progress of colors leads the eye up a far hill, a sweeping big farm of a hill whose pale pastures bounce light all day from a billion stems and blades. Down the hill’s rim drops a dark slope of forest, a slant your eye rides down to the point, the dark sliver of land that holds the bay. From this angle you see the bay cut a crescent; your eye flies up the black beach to the point, or slides down the green firs to the point, and the point is an arrow pointing over and over, with its log-strewn beach, its gray singleness, and its recurved white edging of foam, to sea: to bright Haro Strait, the bluing of water with distance at the world’s edge, and on it the far blue islands, and over these lights the light clouds.
You can’t picture it, can you? Neither can I. Oh, the desk is yellow, the oak table round, the ferns alive, the mirror cold, and I never cared. I read. In the Middle Ages, I read, “the idea of a thing which a man framed for himself was always more real to him than the actual thing itself.” Of course. I am in my own Middle Ages; the world at my feet, the world through the window, is an illuminated manuscript whose leaves the wind takes, one by one, whose painted illuminations and halting words draw me, one by one, and I am dazzled in day and lost.
There is, in short, one country, one room, one enormous window, one cat, one spider, and one person: but I am myself hollow. And, for now,