B000W93CNG EBOK by Annie Dillard Read Free Book Online

technician, a volunteer fireman, a husband and father, and an unequaled contributor of witty remarks into the window of each car that rolled on and off the ferry. May his tribe increase.
    One rainy day, this member of the real world gave me a ride home. I invited him in for a minute, and somehow all hell broke loose.
    Politely, he asked me about my writing. Foolishly, not dreaming I was about to set my own world tumbling down about my ears, I said I hated to write. I said I would rather do anything else. He was amazed. He said, “That’s like a guy who works in a factory all day, and hates it.” Then I was amazed, for so it was. It was just like that. Why did I do it? I had never inquired. How had I let it creep up on me? Why wasn’t I running a ferryboat, like sane people?
    I hid my amazement as well as I could from both of us, and said that actually I avoided writing, and mostly what I did by way of work was fool around, and that for example that morning I had been breaking my brain trying to explain Whitehead to my journal. Why, he wanted to know, was I doing that? Again I stopped completely short; I could not imagine why on earth I was doing that. Why was I doing that?
    But I rallied and mustered and said that the idea was to learn things; that you learn a thing and then as a matter of course you learn the next thing, and the next thing…. As I spoke he nodded precisely in the way that one nods at the utterances of the deranged. “…And then,” I finished brightly, “you die!”
    At this we exchanged a mutual and enormous smile. Still nodding and smiling in perfect agreement, we ended the visit and walked to the door.
     
    A week later I had a visit so instructive that when it was over, and I had fully absorbed its lesson, I considered never opening my door again. This was a visit from children.
    During the week after the ferryman’s visit, I asked myself where my life had gone wrong. I was too far removed from the world. My work was too obscure, too symbolic, too intellectual. It was not available to people. Recently I had published a complex narrative essay about a moth’s flying into a candle, which no one had understood but a Yale critic, and he hadunderstood it exactly. I myself was trained as a critic. I was a critic writing for critics: was this what I had in mind?
    One day, full of such thoughts, I tried to work and failed. After eight hours of watching helplessly while my own inane, manneristic doodles overstepped their margins and covered the pages I was supposed to be writing, I gave up. I decided to hate myself, to make popcorn and read. I had just sunk into the couch, the bowl of popcorn beside me, when I heard footsteps outside. It was two little neighborhood boys, Brad and Brian, who were seven and six. “Smells good in here,” Brian said. So we ate the bowl of popcorn on the floor and talked. They played the harmonica; they played the recorder; they played the ukulele.
    Then Brian got up and stood by my desk, on which there happened to be a pen drawing of a burning candle.
    Brian said, “Is that the candle the moth flew into?”
    I looked at him: W HAT ?
    He said, and I quote exactly, “Is that the candle the moth flew into, and his abdomen got stuck, and his head caught fire?”
    W HAT ? I said. W HAT ? These little blue-jeaned kids were in the first grade. They came up to my pockets. Brad, on the floor, piped up, “I liked that story.” Why, if I was sincere in anything, did it seem to console me to repeat to myself, “Oh well, he’s older”?
    Later, before they left, Brian made certain I understood that whatever sphere of discourse I fancied I shared with any interlocutor, I was wrong. Brian said (admiringly, I thought), “Did you write that story?” I started to answer, when he continued, “Or did you type it?”
     
    Here is a fairly sober version of what happens in the small room between the writer and the work itself. It is similar to what happens between a painter and the