I remember hearing wonderful, non-specific things about this book from the time it came out just last year, but I hear wonderful non-specific things about all kinds of books. I had no reason to be excited about it. I had never read Annie Dillard before, so I didn’t know what I (now assume I) was missing. I may have even read a synopsis at some point, and I’m sure I was put off because it was so vague.
This post will be accused of the same, I’m sure, but you’ll forgive me if you do read the book.
As easily as I had decided that I needed nothing to do with the book in the first place, I suddenly became convinced that I could not live any longer without reading it after reading an interview with Annie Dillard I-don’t-know-where. And it was some time ago now, so I don’t remember details, but I remember that she was talking specifically about The Maytrees. I still had little idea as to what the book was about, but somehow, for some reason, when Annie Dillard claimed that she had simply wanted to write a nice, clean, simple book and this was the result, I was won over. Perhaps because I was in the middle of graduate literature classes and, delightful though Vanity Fair is, I really could have used a break.
There is little I can tell you beyond this, I’m afraid. Lou and Maytree fall in love, and Maytree pores over philosophy and novels trying to determine what this sensation is and from whence it comes. Toward the beginning of the book a major event that I certainly can’t divulge takes place, and so there is little else I can say about it plot-wise. Needless to say, thinking this a plain, simple, clean book, I was unprepared for what would happend. As I sat curled up in a hard wooden chair in a D.C. Borders, my jaw literally dropped as I saw the scene unfurling a single paragraph ahead. How…? Why…? But see for yourself.
As I said, I had never read Annie Dillard before and it was truly a treat. Funny that I’m not big on modern poetry (so sue me), yet the fact that Ms. Dillard is a poet becomes apparent even in her prose, and I found it thoroughly satisfying.
Lou knew all along that Deary originated theories. -Another time you bang a knuckle, and maybe twenty years later you pinch its other side. With each injury you learn how that patch of you feels. It wakens. Until it heals, you’re aware of those nerves.
-This is a privilege?
-Of course. Every place you injure adds that patch to your consciousness. You grow more alive. And the point of all this is – she beamed up from the sand at Lou – that when you have hurt every single place on your body, you die!
***
Sometimes now Lou searched old albums to test her proposition that nothing so compels a woman as the boyhood of the man she loves.
***
At the Bronx Zoo years ago a lion and a tiger were milk brothers. Lions and tigers hail from Africa and Asia respectively, and would fight if they met. In the zoo these two were close. Neither had ever seen himself, only the other. Each had looked at the other for as long as he could remember. So the lion thought he was a tiger, as it were, and he feared adult lions. The tiger feared adult tigers. Only in the face of the other did each find home. Maytree watched sky’s turmoil and a scallop dredge heading out.
***
Sometimes by day or night heheard them breathe old as oceans – experienced. They enfolded each other and looked over each other’s shoulders at the world’s wreck where all shattered, at bareness they held at bay. Or they cradled the world between them like a mortally sick child, loving it and not telling it all they knew.
Now in compassion they bore, between them, their solitudes each the size of the raveled globe. Everything looked better since they were old.
It doesn’t get any better than this.
