{"asin":"B000W94GJ0","title":"An American Childhood","authors":"Annie Dillard","highlights":[{"text":"Who could ever tire of this heart-stopping transition, of this breakthrough shift between seeing and knowing you see, between being and knowing you be?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=278","value":278},"note":null},{"text":"all we have, the gift at the moment of opening it?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=282","value":282},"note":null},{"text":"the chewing out was redundant, a mere formality, and beside the point. The point was that he had chased us passionately without giving up, and so he had caught us.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=690","value":690},"note":null},{"text":"We could have run through every backyard in North America until we got to Panama. But when he trapped us at the lip of the Panama Canal, what precisely could he have done to prolong the drama of the chase and cap its glory?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=693","value":693},"note":null},{"text":"He could only have fried Mikey Fahey and me in boiling oil, say, or dismembered us piecemeal, or staked us to anthills.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=694","value":694},"note":null},{"text":"He could only begin, “You stupid kids,” and continue in his ordinary Pittsburgh accent with his normal righteous anger and the usual common sense.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=696","value":696},"note":null},{"text":"If in that snowy backyard the driver of the black Buick had cut off our heads, Mikey’s and mine, I would have died happy, for nothing has required so much of me since","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=698","value":698},"note":null},{"text":"I don’t know how he found his way back to his car.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=700","value":700},"note":null},{"text":"OUR PARENTS WOULD SOONER HAVE left us out of Christmas than leave us out of a joke.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=703","value":703},"note":null},{"text":"They explained a joke to us while they were still laughing at it; they tore a still-kicking joke apart, so we could see how it worked.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=704","value":704},"note":null},{"text":"Remembering jokes was a moral obligation.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=708","value":708},"note":null},{"text":"People who said, “I can never remember jokes,” were like people who said, obliviously, “I can never remember names,” or “I don’t bathe.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=708","value":708},"note":null},{"text":"We tinkered with a joke’s narrative structure: “Maybe you should begin with the Indians.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=713","value":713},"note":null},{"text":"“Frog goes into a bank,” you said, and your canoe had slipped delicately and surely into the water, into Lake Champlain with painted Indians behind every tree, and there was no turning back.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=720","value":720},"note":null},{"text":"These creatures apparently came into bars all over America, either accompanied or alone, and sat down to face incredulous, sarcastic bartenders.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=722","value":722},"note":null},{"text":"(It was a wonder the bartenders were always so surprised to see talking dogs or drinking monkeys or performing ants, so surprised year after year, when clearly this sort of thing was the very essence of bar life.)","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=723","value":723},"note":null},{"text":"swinging aloft in the airy interval between college and marriage,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=725","value":725},"note":null},{"text":"painstaking paleontological reconstruction of vanished jokes from extant tag lines.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=749","value":749},"note":null},{"text":"It was a long, absurdly funny, excruciatingly tricky tour de force he had to tell fast, and it required beat-perfect concentration.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=760","value":760},"note":null},{"text":"He had to go off alone and rouse himself to an exalted, superhuman pitch in order to pace the hot coals of its dazzling verbal surface.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=761","value":761},"note":null},{"text":"You learned that some people, notably your parents, could rescue some things by careful narration from the category “woulda hadda been there” to the category “it tells.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=781","value":781},"note":null},{"text":"You scooped the potentially solid tale from the flux of history.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=783","value":783},"note":null},{"text":"The straight man’s was an honorable calling, a bit like that of the rodeo clown: despised by the ignorant masses, perhaps, but revered among experts who understood the skills required and the risks run.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=801","value":801},"note":null},{"text":"We children mastered the deliberate misunderstanding, the planted pun, the Gracie Allen know-nothing remark, which can make of any interlocutor an instant hero.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=802","value":802},"note":null},{"text":"He slept on the third floor. On a kitchen counter was his drinking glass.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=850","value":850},"note":null},{"text":"Almost all of her family, she told me, had died one day during the 1918 flu epidemic; her parents and most of her brothers and sisters had died one after the other in the house.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=857","value":857},"note":null},{"text":"There was something Victorian about her. Her grasp of the great world was slender.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=868","value":868},"note":null},{"text":"She believed that there was not only a telephone operator assigned to her, but also a burglar.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=869","value":869},"note":null},{"text":"Standard Corporation started as a plumbing brass foundry","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=877","value":877},"note":null},{"text":"their breaking sounded like poured raw rice.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=891","value":891},"note":null},{"text":"I never expected to find “redd up” in so grand a thing as a book.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=975","value":975},"note":null},{"text":"I was ten years old now, up into the double numbers, where I would likely remain till I died.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=986","value":986},"note":null},{"text":"I thought suddenly; I have converged with myself in the present.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=987","value":987},"note":null},{"text":"I felt time in full stream, and I felt consciousness in full stream joining it, like the rivers.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=988","value":988},"note":null},{"text":"Beneath the new city, and tucked up its hilly alleys, lay the old Pittsburgh, and the old foothill land beneath it. It was all old if you dug far enough.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=994","value":994},"note":null},{"text":"sliding pile of cities built ever nearer the sky,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=996","value":996},"note":null},{"text":"they poured asphalt over the streetcar tracks, streetcar tracks their fathers had wormed between the old riverworn cobblestones, cobblestones laid smack into the notorious nineteenth-century mud.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1000","value":1000},"note":null},{"text":"(Then it ducked far underground and ran up into Nova Scotia, dove into the water and crossed under the Atlantic, and rolled up again thick with coal in Wales.)","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1007","value":1007},"note":null},{"text":"Her private life unwinds inside her skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life—the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives—as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them. I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1012","value":1012},"note":null},{"text":"Everywhere I looked, it was the Valley of the Kings, their dynasty just ended, and their monuments intact but already out of fashion.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1029","value":1029},"note":null},{"text":"amazing how fast it ages if you let it alone—","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1032","value":1032},"note":null},{"text":"Presbyterian churches, their anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, Republicanism, and love of continuous work; their dogmatic practicality, their easy friendliness, their Pittsburgh-centered innocence, and, paradoxically, their egalitarianism.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1033","value":1033},"note":null},{"text":"People who cared to rave about their bloodlines, Mother told us, had stayed in Europe, which deserved them.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1037","value":1037},"note":null},{"text":"There were the makers of cannonballs for the Civil War.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1049","value":1049},"note":null},{"text":"where two rivers converged to make a third river.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1052","value":1052},"note":null},{"text":"bright-eyed in, into nowhere from out of nowhere,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1054","value":1054},"note":null},{"text":"I treasured some bits; they provided doll-like figures for imagination’s travels and wars. There in private imagination were the vivid figures of history in costume, tricked out as if for amateur outdoor drama: a moving, clumsy, insignificant spectacle like everything else the imagination proposes to itself for pure pleasure only—nothing real, nobody gets hurt, it’s only ketchup.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1056","value":1056},"note":null},{"text":"Since there was no model, nude or clothed, I drew my baseball mitt.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1071","value":1071},"note":null},{"text":"recorded it like Meriwether Lewis mapping the Rockies.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1078","value":1078},"note":null},{"text":"long as you want to keep drawing that mitt, and studying that mitt, there will always be a new and finer layer of distinctions to draw out and lay in.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1083","value":1083},"note":null},{"text":"Your attention discovers—seems thereby to produce—an array of interesting features in any object, like a lamp.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1084","value":1084},"note":null},{"text":"Nonfiction was on the left.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1111","value":1111},"note":null},{"text":"was afraid, too, that my letter would disappoint him by betraying my ignorance, which was just beginning to attract my own notice.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1129","value":1129},"note":null},{"text":"Often, when I was in the library, I simply visited it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1142","value":1142},"note":null},{"text":"There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1152","value":1152},"note":null},{"text":"They mixed good and bad books together because they could not distinguish between them.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1154","value":1154},"note":null},{"text":"Suited to female children were love stories set in any century but this one.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1158","value":1158},"note":null},{"text":"Ulysses, a very famous book, was also awful.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1169","value":1169},"note":null},{"text":"It was simply a hazard of reading.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1177","value":1177},"note":null},{"text":"Perhaps later, when I had become an architect, I would enjoy the latter halves","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1178","value":1178},"note":null},{"text":"plundered in deep concentration for many years.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1180","value":1180},"note":null},{"text":"no more expected anyone else on earth to have read a book I had read than I expected someone else to have twirled the same blade of grass.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1181","value":1181},"note":null},{"text":"the people who read my favorite books were invisible or in hiding, underground.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1183","value":1183},"note":null},{"text":"made endless vows according to their lights,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1186","value":1186},"note":null},{"text":"And when he laughed, his face reddened and gave off a vaporous heat. He seemed tickled inside his jiggling bones; he flapped his arms and slapped himself and tears fell on his tie.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1285","value":1285},"note":null},{"text":"These were boys who wore ties from the moment their mothers could locate their necks.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1292","value":1292},"note":null},{"text":"to begin learning with them that unplumbed intimacy that is life’s chief joy.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1301","value":1301},"note":null},{"text":"parodied curiosity, as if to see if—by chance—anybody has noticed small her and found her amusing.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1312","value":1312},"note":null},{"text":"We all suffered a bit for want of more of these words.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1323","value":1323},"note":null},{"text":"her big dumb baldness,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1327","value":1327},"note":null},{"text":"The idea was to say “Hello, Horatio” not loudly but deeply, in a voice so resonant that passersby far below would look up. That was the test.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1341","value":1341},"note":null},{"text":"The name of the movie was Night of the Living Dead.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1355","value":1355},"note":null},{"text":"pitched, as I did most things, in order to concentrate.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1366","value":1366},"note":null},{"text":"The tag ends of summer—before or after camp, before or after Lake Erie—","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1391","value":1391},"note":null},{"text":"hand just so, and fit it. Its red stitches, its good leather and hardness like skin over bone, seemed to call forth a skill both easy and precise.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1404","value":1404},"note":null},{"text":"When you hit it with a bat it cracked—and your heart cracked, too, at the sound.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1408","value":1408},"note":null},{"text":"lived lashed in your mitt all winter, hibernating.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1409","value":1409},"note":null},{"text":"watched the yellow sparks pool and crackle around the cable’s torn end and splash out of the pit and over the asphalt in a stream toward the curb and my shoes.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1425","value":1425},"note":null},{"text":"And here was a pleasant, once-in-a-lifetime tornado, the funnel of which touched down, in an almost delicate point, like a bolt of lightning, on our very street.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1432","value":1432},"note":null},{"text":"leafy buckeye branches out front blow white and upward like skirts.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1434","value":1434},"note":null},{"text":"Your skin would wiggle up in waves like an electrified cat’s in a cartoon; your hair would rise stiff from your head; anyone who touched you by mistake would stick to you wavy-skinned and paralyzed.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1438","value":1438},"note":null},{"text":"So you had to pay attention, alas, and could not simply coast along over cobblestones, blissfully vibrating all over.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1467","value":1467},"note":null},{"text":"The streetcars’ overhead network of wires made of Penn Avenue a loose-roofed tunnel.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1470","value":1470},"note":null},{"text":"The wires cut the sky into rectangles inside which you could compose various views as you walked.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1471","value":1471},"note":null},{"text":"the big orange streetcars clanged and spat along; they stopped and started, tethered to their wires overhead and trapped in their grooves below.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1481","value":1481},"note":null},{"text":"Every day at a hundred intersections they locked horns with cars that blocked their paths—","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1482","value":1482},"note":null},{"text":"A streetcar’s wheel could slick a penny and enlarge it to a stripe.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1495","value":1495},"note":null},{"text":"The streetcar hit the stone audibly and rose like a beached whale. Its big orange body faltered in the air, heaved toward the lane of cars beside it, trembled, and finally fell down on its track and broke the stone. And went on, bumping again only slightly when the rear wheel went over it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1499","value":1499},"note":null},{"text":"I would have to come forward and give myself up to the police, and do time, and all that, for the alternative was living all the rest of life on the lam.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1504","value":1504},"note":null},{"text":"each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1509","value":1509},"note":null},{"text":"fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1510","value":1510},"note":null},{"text":"There was joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1515","value":1515},"note":null},{"text":"People slowed the spread of yellow fever; they sprayed the Isthmus of Panama puddle by puddle.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1516","value":1516},"note":null},{"text":"You can’t test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1531","value":1531},"note":null},{"text":"Her warm, intelligent glance said she knew what I was doing—not because she herself had been a child but because she herself took a few loose aerial turns around her apartment every night for the hell of it, and by day played along with the rest of the world and took the streetcar.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1540","value":1540},"note":null},{"text":"we passed on the sidewalk with a look of accomplices who share a humor just beyond irony. What’s a heart for?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1544","value":1544},"note":null},{"text":"was all but splitting, all but shooting sparks.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1547","value":1547},"note":null},{"text":"For what were the people on Penn Avenue to me, or what was I to myself, really, but a witness to any boldness I could muster, or any cowardice if it came to that, any giving up on heaven for the sake of dignity on earth? I had not seen a great deal accomplished in the name of dignity, ever.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1549","value":1549},"note":null},{"text":"Terwilliger bunts one!”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1556","value":1556},"note":null},{"text":"Panama Canal in reverse,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1572","value":1572},"note":null},{"text":"Hearing this, moved, I thought all the suffering of road building was worth it (it wasn’t my suffering),","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1575","value":1575},"note":null},{"text":"It must have galled her that usually her acquaintances were so predictably unalert; it must have galled her that, for the length of her life, she could surprise everyone so continually, so easily, when she had been the same all along.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1599","value":1599},"note":null},{"text":"She regarded the instructions on bureaucratic forms as straight lines. “Do you advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence?” After some thought she wrote, “Force.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1602","value":1602},"note":null},{"text":"During a family trip to the Highland Park Zoo, Mother and I were alone for a minute. She approached a young couple holding hands on a bench by the seals, and addressed the young man in dripping tones: “Where have you been? Still got those baby-blue eyes; always did slay me. And this”—a swift nod at the dumbstruck young woman, who had removed her hand from the man’s—“must be the one you were telling me about. She’s not so bad, really, as you used to make out. But listen, you know how I miss you, you know where to reach me, same old place. And there’s Ann over there—see how she’s grown? See the blue eyes?” And off she sashayed, taking me firmly by the hand, and leading us around briskly past the monkey house and away. She cocked an ear back, and both of us heard the desperate man begin, in a high-pitched wail, “I swear, I never saw her before in my life….”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1610","value":1610},"note":null},{"text":"She dearly loved to fluster people by throwing out a game’s rules at whim—when she was getting bored, losing in a dull sort of way, and when everybody else was taking it too seriously. If you turned your back, she moved the checkers around on the board. When you got them all straightened out, she denied she’d touched them; the next time you turned your back, she lined them up on the rug or hid them under your chair. In a betting rummy game called Michigan, she routinely played out of turn, or called out a card she didn’t hold, or counted backward, simply to amuse herself by causing an uproar and watching the rest of us do double takes and have fits.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1621","value":1621},"note":null},{"text":"(Much later, when serious suitors came to call, Mother subjected them to this fast card game as a trial by ordeal; she used it as an intelligence test and a measure of spirit. If the poor man could stay a round without breaking down or running out, he got to marry one of us, if he still wanted to.)","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1626","value":1626},"note":null},{"text":"She didn’t like the taste of stamps so she didn’t lick stamps; she licked the corner of the envelope instead. She glued sandpaper to the sides of kitchen drawers, and under kitchen cabinets, so she always had a handy place to strike a match.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1646","value":1646},"note":null},{"text":"To splint a finger, she stuck it in a lightweight cigar tube. Conversely, to protect a pack of cigarettes, she carried it in a Band-Aid box.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1648","value":1648},"note":null},{"text":"Lendalarm was a beeper you attached to books (or tools) you loaned friends. After ten days, the beeper sounded. Only the rightful owner could silence it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1650","value":1650},"note":null},{"text":"Torpid conformity was a kind of sin; it was stupidity itself, the mighty stream against which Mother would never cease to struggle.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1660","value":1660},"note":null},{"text":"If you held no minority opinions, or if you failed to risk total ostracism for them daily, the world would be a better place without you.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1660","value":1660},"note":null},{"text":"Mother, and she would take on anybody on any issue—the chairman of the board, at a cocktail party, on the current strike; she would fly at him in a flurry of passion, as a songbird selflessly attacks a big hawk.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1674","value":1674},"note":null},{"text":"The Indians were the sentimental favorites, but they were visibly cruel.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1690","value":1690},"note":null},{"text":"But if they won, we would all speak French, which seemed affected in the woods.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1691","value":1691},"note":null},{"text":"and their partisans wrote all the books that fell into my hands.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1692","value":1692},"note":null},{"text":"Indian warriors shot from cover, which offended those British soldiers who had time to notice before they died.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1700","value":1700},"note":null},{"text":"This war was part of my own private consciousness, the dreamlike interior murmur of books.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1708","value":1708},"note":null},{"text":"that long suspended interval between terror and anger.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1754","value":1754},"note":null},{"text":"I saw us as if from above, even then, even as I stood in place living out my childhood and knowing it, aware of myself as if from above and behind, skinny and exultant on the street.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=1755","value":1755},"note":null},{"text":"I was beginning the lifelong task of tuning my own gauges. I was there to brace myself for leaving. I was having my childhood. But I was haunting it, as well, practically reading it, and preventing it. How much noticing could I permit myself without driving myself round the bend?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2220","value":2220},"note":null},{"text":"Too much noticing and I was too self-conscious to live; I trapped and paralyzed myself, and dragged my friends down with me, so we couldn’t meet each other’s eyes, my own loud awareness damning us both.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2222","value":2222},"note":null},{"text":"quick Ellin Hahn, black-haired and ruddy, who bestrode the social world like a Colossus, saying always just the right and funny thing.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2243","value":2243},"note":null},{"text":"People’s being themselves, year after year, so powerfully and so obliviously—what was it?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2246","value":2246},"note":null},{"text":"I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2250","value":2250},"note":null},{"text":"Everything in the world, every baby, city, tetanus shot, tennis ball, and pebble, was an outcrop of some vast and hitherto concealed vein of knowledge, apparently, that had compelled people’s emotions and engaged their minds in the minutest detail without anyone’s having done with it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2274","value":2274},"note":null},{"text":"There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth—fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2276","value":2276},"note":null},{"text":"There was no one here but us fanatics: bird-watchers, infielders, detectives, poets, rock collectors, and, I inferred, specialists in things I had not looked into—violin makers, fishermen, Islamic scholars, opera composers, people who studied Bali, vials of air, bats. It seemed to take all these people working full time to extract the interest from everything and articulate it for the rest of us.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2278","value":2278},"note":null},{"text":"Every least thing I picked up was proving to be the hanging end of a very long rope.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2281","value":2281},"note":null},{"text":"Everywhere, things snagged me. The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2295","value":2295},"note":null},{"text":"There, at the twig’s top, the moth shook its sodden clumps of wings. When it spread those wings—those beautiful wings—blood would fill their veins, and the birth fluids on the wings’ frail sheets would harden to make them tough as sails. But the moth could not spread its wide wings at all; the jar was too small. The wings could not fill, so they hardened while they were still crumpled from the cocoon. A smaller moth could have spread its wings to their utmost in that mason jar, but the Polyphemus moth was big. Its gold furred body was almost as big as a mouse. Its brown, yellow, pink, and blue wings would have extended six inches from tip to tip, if there had been no mason jar. It would have been big as a wren.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2301","value":2301},"note":null},{"text":"The teacher let the deformed creature go.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2307","value":2307},"note":null},{"text":"She bounced the moth from its jar and set it on the school’s asphalt driveway. The moth set out walking. It could only heave the golden wrinkly clumps where its wings should have been; it could only crawl down the school driveway on its six frail legs.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2307","value":2307},"note":null},{"text":"knew that this particular moth, the big walking moth, could not travel more than a few more yards before a bird or a cat began to eat it, or a car ran over it. Nevertheless, it was crawling with what seemed wonderful vigor, as if, I thought at the time, it was still excited from being born.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2312","value":2312},"note":null},{"text":"have told this story before, and may yet tell it again, to lay the moth’s ghost, for I still see it crawl down the broad black driveway, and I still see its golden wing clumps heave.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2315","value":2315},"note":null},{"text":"I hated insects; that was the fact. I never caught my stamp collection trying to crawl away.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2354","value":2354},"note":null},{"text":"I hated insects; that I knew. Fingering insects was touching the rim of nightmare. But you have to study something.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2363","value":2363},"note":null},{"text":"I liked their invisibility; they did not matter, so they did not exist. People’s nervous systems edited out the sight of insects before it reached their brains; my seeing insects let me live alongside human society in a different sensory world, just as insects themselves do.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2365","value":2365},"note":null},{"text":"How many shovelfuls of dirt did men move to dig the Panama Canal? Two hundred and forty million cubic yards. It took ten years and twenty-one thousand lives and $336,650,000, but it was possible.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2439","value":2439},"note":null},{"text":"I thought a great deal about the Panama Canal, and always contemplated the same notion: You could take more time, and do it with teaspoons.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2440","value":2440},"note":"No one:Annie Dillard: the Panama Cannal"},{"text":"It was all the same story. You have a great idea and spend grinding years at dull tasks, still charged by your vision.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2448","value":2448},"note":null},{"text":"We grew up with the myth of the French Impressionist painters, and its queer implication that rejection and ridicule guaranteed, or at any rate signaled, a project’s worth.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2451","value":2451},"note":null},{"text":"Because I was all untried courage, I could not allow that the loss of courage was a real factor to be reckoned in.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2458","value":2458},"note":null},{"text":"put my faith in willpower, that weak notion by which children seek to replace the loving devotion that comes from intimate and dedicated knowledge.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2459","value":2459},"note":null},{"text":"I had not known it to fail in the two times I had applied it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2467","value":2467},"note":null},{"text":"I knew life pulled you in two; you never healed.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2469","value":2469},"note":null},{"text":"“There’s someone I’m trying so hard to forget—don’t you want to forget someone too?,”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2472","value":2472},"note":null},{"text":"these facile, breathy lyrics struck me as an unexpectedly true expression of how it felt to be alive. This was experience at its most private and inarticulate: longing and loss.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2473","value":2473},"note":null},{"text":"they mourn this absence or loss of someone, and sense that unnamable loss as a hole or hollow moving beside them in the air.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2476","value":2476},"note":null},{"text":"Loss grew as you did, without your consent; your losses mounted beside you like earthworm castings.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2479","value":2479},"note":null},{"text":"The strongest men and women who had ever lived had presumably tried to resist their own deaths, and now they were dead. It was on this fact that all the stirring biographies coincided, concurred, and culminated. Time itself bent you and cracked you on its wheel.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2481","value":2481},"note":null},{"text":"As a life’s work, I would remember everything—everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net. I would trap and keep every teacher’s funny remark, every face on the street, every microscopic alga’s sway, every conversation, configuration of leaves, every dream, and every scrap of overhead cloud. Who would remember Molly’s infancy if not me? (Unaccountably, I thought that only I had noticed—not Molly, but time itself. No one else, at least, seemed bugged by it. Children may believe that they alone have interior lives.)","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2491","value":2491},"note":null},{"text":"Somebody had to do it, somebody had to hang on to the days with teeth and fists, or the whole show had been in vain. That it was impossible never entered my reckoning. For work, for a task, I had never heard the word.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2496","value":2496},"note":null},{"text":"I shamed myself by minding that the dance was out.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2504","value":2504},"note":null},{"text":"In horizontal space, our family now lived near our first house on Edgerton Avenue, near St. Bede’s Church. In vertical space, we were quite distant from it. Queerly, an inhumanly long and steep flight of outdoor stairs connected our newest neighborhood to our oldest one.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2519","value":2519},"note":null},{"text":"Down that now leafy street Jo Ann Sheehy had skated, and I had run from the nuns and run from the man whose windshield we hit with a snowball.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2529","value":2529},"note":null},{"text":"our reading was private, and constant, like the interior life itself.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2563","value":2563},"note":null},{"text":"Of what use was a broadsword, or even a longbow, against Hitler’s armies which occupied Europe, against Hitler’s Luftwaffe, Hitler’s Panzers, Hitler’s U-boats, or against Hitler’s S.S., who banged on the door and led Anne Frank and her family away?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2571","value":2571},"note":null},{"text":"We closed our eyes and imagined how we would survive the death camps—maybe with honor and maybe not. We imagined how we would escape the death camps, imagined how we would liberate the death camps. How?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2573","value":2573},"note":null},{"text":"We fancied and schemed, but we had read too much, and knew there was no possible way.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2574","value":2574},"note":null},{"text":"This was a novel concept: Can’t do.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2575","value":2575},"note":null},{"text":"We were in for the duration. We closed our eyes and waited for the Allies, but the Allies were detained.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2575","value":2575},"note":null},{"text":"The Young Lions.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2577","value":2577},"note":null},{"text":"was a skilled bombardier. I could run a submarine with one hand, and evade torpedoes, depth charges, and mines. I could disembowel a soldier with a bayonet, survive under a tarp in a lifeboat, and parachute behind enemy lines. I could contact the Resistance with my high-school French and eavesdrop on the Germans with my high-school German:","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2584","value":2584},"note":null},{"text":"Hiroshima.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2594","value":2594},"note":null},{"text":"Reading about the bomb was a part of reading about the war: these were actual things and events, large in their effects on millions of people, vivid in their nearness to each man’s or woman’s death. It was a relief to turn from life to something important.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2594","value":2594},"note":null},{"text":"and those educated, beautifully mannered European women who taught French, history, and German, who had landed in Pittsburgh","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2605","value":2605},"note":null},{"text":"We folded our skinny arms over our heads, and raised to the enemy a clatter of gold scarab bracelets and gold bangle bracelets.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2608","value":2608},"note":null},{"text":"On the other hand, I considered that if it came down to it, I would have to take charge.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2630","value":2630},"note":null},{"text":"was now believing books more than I believed what I saw and heard. I was reading books about the actual, historical, moral world—in which somehow I felt I was not living.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2634","value":2634},"note":null},{"text":"The French and Indian War had been, for me, a purely literary event. Skilled men in books could survive it. Those who died, an arrow through the heart, thrilled me by their last words.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2636","value":2636},"note":null},{"text":"Those who died in this war’s books died whether they were skilled or not. Bombs fell on their cities or ships, or they starved in the camps or were gassed or shot, or they stepped on land mines and died surprised, trying to push their intestines back in their abdomens with their fingers and thumbs.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2639","value":2639},"note":null},{"text":"What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2643","value":2643},"note":null},{"text":"Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized. This life could be found and joined, like the Resistance. I kept this exhilarating faith alive in myself, concealed under my uniform shirt like an oblate’s ribbon; I would not be parted from it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2645","value":2645},"note":null},{"text":"We who had grown up in the Warsaw ghetto, who had seen all our families gassed in the death chambers, who had shipped before the mast, and hunted sperm whale in Antarctic seas; we who had marched from Moscow to Poland and lost our legs to the cold; we who knew by heart every snag and sandbar on the Mississippi River south of Cairo, and knew by heart Morse code, forty parables and psalms, and lots of Shakespeare; we who had battled Hitler and Hirohito in the North Atlantic, in North Africa, in New Guinea and Burma and Guam, in the air over London, in the Greek and Italian hills; we who had learned to man minesweepers before we learned to walk in high heels—were we going to marry Holden Caulfield’s roommate, and buy a house in Point Breeze, and send our children to dancing school?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2649","value":2649},"note":null},{"text":"When it happened, I must have been out of the room.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2658","value":2658},"note":null},{"text":"They would let us listen to them talk, and we heard them mention the state legislature, say, or some opinion of Cicero’s, or the Battle of the Marne—and those things abruptly became possible topics in society because those magnificent boys had pronounced their names.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2660","value":2660},"note":null},{"text":"You would never tire of running your wondering eyes over the mystery of their construction, so plain, and the mystery of their bulk, and the mystery of their skin, and even their strange boxy clothes. The boys.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2668","value":2668},"note":null},{"text":"wondered which of those remote country-club powers, those white-haired sincere men, those golden-haired, long-toothed, ironic women, had met on what firm cloud over western Pennsylvania to apportion and schedule these events among the scattered country clubs, and had pored over what unthinkable list of schoolchildren to discuss which schoolchildren should be asked to these dances they held for what reason. If you were part Jewish, would they find you out, like Hitler? How small a part could they detect? What was at the end of all this novitiate—solemn vows?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2685","value":2685},"note":null},{"text":"We ate wild rice, tomato aspic, and, as a concession to our being in fact children, hot fudge sundaes or green peppermint parfaits.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2696","value":2696},"note":null},{"text":"Sometimes, though, on a jitterbug or a Charleston, you could pry a wink out of the drummer.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2702","value":2702},"note":null},{"text":"Up on the Hill, he went to whorehouses. Was this not bold, evil, original? Our own boys would never think of that.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2719","value":2719},"note":null},{"text":"From their boarding school they had walked, loose, in the towns of Connecticut, and knew them well enough to dismiss them.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2720","value":2720},"note":null},{"text":"smooth disdain","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2721","value":2721},"note":null},{"text":"There was nothing flirtatious about it. It was more an exultant and concentrated collaboration, such as aerialists enjoy—and I hope they enjoy it—when they catch each other twirling in midair.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2725","value":2725},"note":null},{"text":"and if we were any good we’d make sure we fell on the downbeat, snow or no snow.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2727","value":2727},"note":null},{"text":"Christ appeared to drift flattened and clumsy, shriveled but glorious. Barefoot as he was, and with the suggestion of sandstone scarps behind him, he looked rural.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2777","value":2777},"note":null},{"text":"The mosaic caught the few church lights—lights like tapers in a castle—and spread them dimly, a dusting of gold like pollen, throughout the vast and solemn space.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2781","value":2781},"note":null},{"text":"they seemed to be looking around for the entrance to some other life. Only","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2794","value":2794},"note":null},{"text":"I knew enough of the Bible to damn these people to hell, citing chapter and verse. My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2828","value":2828},"note":null},{"text":"elders and ushers spread swiftly and silently over the marble aisles in discreet pairs, some for bread cubes, some for grape juice, communicating by eyebrow only.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2841","value":2841},"note":null},{"text":"It was not surprising, really, that I alone in this church knew what the barefoot Christ, if there had been such a person, would think about things—grape juice, tailcoats, British vowels, sable stoles.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2847","value":2847},"note":null},{"text":"The Indians had tied the soldiers and settlers to trees, heaped hot coals on their feet, and let their small boys practice archery on them.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2889","value":2889},"note":null},{"text":"Andrew Carnegie started out in Pittsburgh as a tiny bobbin boy, and ended up a tiny millionaire; he was only five feet three.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2957","value":2957},"note":null},{"text":"could have slain king, duke, or lord, and considered their death a service to the state.” When later Edward VII offered him a title, he refused it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2964","value":2964},"note":null},{"text":"that time steelworkers worked twelve-hour shifts on floors so hot they had to nail wooden platforms under their shoes. Every two weeks they toiled an inhuman twenty-four-hour shift, and then they got their sole day off.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2986","value":2986},"note":null},{"text":"Andrew Mellon, a banker, invested in aluminum when the industry consisted of a twenty-two-year-old Oberlin College graduate who made it in his family’s woodshed.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=2995","value":2995},"note":null},{"text":"Typhoid fever epidemics recurred, because Pittsburgh’s council members wouldn’t filter the drinking water; they disliked public spending.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3000","value":3000},"note":null},{"text":"There was a Van de Graaff generator; you could make a bright crack of lightning strike it from a rod.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3020","value":3020},"note":null},{"text":"saw the sculpture: a wiry, thin person, long legs in full stride, thrust his small, mute head forward into the empty air. Six feet tall, bronze. I read about the sculpture every time I opened the paper; I saw its picture; I climbed the marble stairs alone to look at it again and again.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3036","value":3036},"note":null},{"text":"perfect person, whose form matched his inner life,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3040","value":3040},"note":null},{"text":"Man Walking was pure consciousness made poignant: a soul without a culture, absolutely alone, without even a time, without people, speech, books, tools, work, or even clothes.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3042","value":3042},"note":null},{"text":"He was in spirit and in form a dissected nerve. He looked freshly made of clay by God, visibly pinched by sure fingertips. He looked like Adam depressed, as if there were no world. He looked like Ahasuerus, condemned to wander without hope. His blind gaze faced the vanishing point.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3045","value":3045},"note":null},{"text":"Man Walking was so skinny his inner life was his outer life; it had nowhere else to go. The point where his head met his spine was the point where spirit met matter. The sculptor’s soul floated to his fingertips; I met him there, on Man Walking’s skin.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3047","value":3047},"note":null},{"text":"(bivalves, univalves; ungulates, lagomorphs),","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3053","value":3053},"note":null},{"text":"They noticed the things that engaged the curious mind: the way the world develops and divides, colony and polyp, population and tissue, ridge and crystal. Artists, for their part, noticed the things that engaged the mind’s private and idiosyncratic interior, that area where the life of the senses mingles with the life of the spirit: the shattering of light into color, and the way it shades off round a bend.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3054","value":3054},"note":null},{"text":"It never crossed my mind that you can’t guess people’s lives from their chatter.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3088","value":3088},"note":null},{"text":"taught by example a dozen kinds of love.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3090","value":3090},"note":null},{"text":"I had taken by then to following her from room to room, trying to get her to spill the beans about being black; she kept moving.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3095","value":3095},"note":null},{"text":"they were off pulling down the money on which","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3100","value":3100},"note":null},{"text":"The water knit a fabric of light over their lively torsos and limbs, a loose gold chain mail.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3120","value":3120},"note":null},{"text":"Oma asked me, when we were alone, what exactly it was that homosexuals did. She was miffed that she’d been unable to command this information before now. She said she’d wondered for many years without knowing who she could ask.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3168","value":3168},"note":null},{"text":"Trying to appease myself, during one winter I whipped my bed every afternoon with my uniform belt. I despised the spectacle I made in my own eyes—whipping the bed with a belt, like a creature demented!—and I often began halfheartedly, but I did it daily after school as a desperate discipline, trying to rid myself and the innocent world of my wildness. It was like trying to beat back the ocean.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3190","value":3190},"note":null},{"text":"but only moved the pile of pages back to the start, without breathing, and began again. I read one such book, an enormous novel, six times that way—closing the binding between sessions, but not between readings.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3195","value":3195},"note":null},{"text":"No possible way of holding him was close enough. Nothing could cure this bad case of gentleness except, perhaps, violence: maybe if he swung me by the legs and split my skull on a tree?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3202","value":3202},"note":null},{"text":"I was what they called a live wire. I was shooting out sparks that were digging a pit around me, and I was sinking into that pit.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3211","value":3211},"note":null},{"text":"My rib cage was so taut I couldn’t breathe. Every cubic centimeter of atmosphere above my shoulders and head was heaped with last straws. Black hatred clogged my very blood. I couldn’t peep, I couldn’t wiggle or blink; my blood was too mad to flow.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3216","value":3216},"note":null},{"text":"For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3219","value":3219},"note":null},{"text":"I couldn’t remember how to forget myself.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3220","value":3220},"note":null},{"text":"didn’t want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else—but swerve as I might, I couldn’t avoid it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3220","value":3220},"note":null},{"text":"Is this how the people around me had died on their feet—inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the sun for so many years the world shriveled around them, and when at last their inescapable orbits had passed through these dark egoistic years it was too late, they had adjusted. Must I then lose the world forever, that I had so loved?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3223","value":3223},"note":null},{"text":"My room was getting to be quite the public arena. Pretty soon they’d put it on the streetcar routes. Why not hold the U.S. Open here?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3239","value":3239},"note":null},{"text":"I knew that Mother had made him come—“She listens to you.” He had undoubtedly been trying to read a book, too.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3241","value":3241},"note":null},{"text":"Emerson’s Essays.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3247","value":3247},"note":null},{"text":"They offered a choice of fancy language saying, “Forget it,” or serenely worded, logical-sounding answers that so strained credibility (pain is God’s megaphone) that “Forget it” seemed in comparison a fine answer.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3261","value":3261},"note":null},{"text":"we hooked our armpits over our chairs’ backs so we cut off all circulation to one arm, in an effort to kill that arm for something to do, or cause a heart attack, whichever came first.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3289","value":3289},"note":null},{"text":"Weren’t there some wars being fought somewhere that I, for one, could join?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3291","value":3291},"note":null},{"text":"closed. As if visual memory were a Marx brothers comedy, I glimpsed swift fragments—a wry corner of his lip, a pointy knuckle, a cupped temple—which crossed the corridor so fast I recognized them only as soon as they vanished.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3294","value":3294},"note":null},{"text":"From the tip of his lively line of patter to the bottom of his heartbroken, hopeful soul was the longest route I knew, and the best.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3296","value":3296},"note":null},{"text":"It was a provocative fact, which I seemed to have discovered, that we students outnumbered our teachers. Must we then huddle here like sheep? By what right, exactly, did these few women keep us sitting here in this clean, bare room to no purpose?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3299","value":3299},"note":null},{"text":"was capturing the flag, turning the double play, chasing butterflies by the country-club pool. Throughout these many years of childhood, a transparent sphere of timelessness contained all my running and spinning as a glass paperweight holds flying snow. The sphere of this idyll broke; time unrolled before me in a line. I woke up and found myself in juvenile court. I was hanging from crutches; for a few weeks after the drag race, neither knee worked. (No one else got hurt.)","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3350","value":3350},"note":null},{"text":"Like Mother and me, she had pale skin that turned turgid and red when she cried; she looked as if she were dying of wounds.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3363","value":3363},"note":null},{"text":"didn’t cry, because, actually, I was an intercontinental ballistic missile, with an atomic warhead; they don’t cry.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3364","value":3364},"note":null},{"text":"She liked boys, emphatically; she followed boys with her big eyes, awed. In my room, Amy listened to me rant; she reported her grade’s daily gossip, laughed at my jokes, cried, “Oh, no!” and told me about the book she was reading, Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White. I liked people to tell me about the books they were reading.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3373","value":3373},"note":null},{"text":"I racked my brain, but couldn’t come up with anything. The U.S. Marines didn’t take sixteen-year-old girls.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3384","value":3384},"note":null},{"text":"I liked language in strips like pennants.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3390","value":3390},"note":null},{"text":"It galled me that adults, as a class, approved the writing and memorization of poetry. Wasn’t poetry secret and subversive?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3394","value":3394},"note":null},{"text":"Li Po.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3395","value":3395},"note":null},{"text":"The best of these, a mounted Arabic battle cry, I recited to myself by the hour, hoping to trammel the teachers’ drone with hoofbeats.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3396","value":3396},"note":null},{"text":"His recreation proceeded from book to book, and had done so all his life.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3406","value":3406},"note":null},{"text":"I felt I was exhuming lost continents and plundering their stores.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3420","value":3420},"note":null},{"text":"thought social and political criticism were interesting, but not nearly so interesting as almost everything else.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3422","value":3422},"note":null},{"text":"Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, excited me enormously. Emerson was my first crack at Platonism, Platonism as it had come bumping and skidding down the centuries and across the ocean to Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson was a thinker, full time, as Pasteur and Salk were full-time biologists. I wrote a paper on Emerson’s notion of the soul—the oversoul, which, if I could banish from my mind the thought of galoshes (one big galosh, in which we have our being), was grand stuff. It was metaphysics at last, poetry with import, philosophy minus the Bible. And Emerson incited to riot, flouting every authority, and requiring each native to cobble up an original relation with the universe. Since rioting seemed to be my specialty, if only by default, Emerson gave me heart.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3423","value":3423},"note":null},{"text":"I didn’t draw I couldn’t bear to listen in class; drawing siphoned off some restlessness.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3466","value":3466},"note":null},{"text":"paid no attention to the drawings. They were manneristic, obsessive, careless grotesques my hand gibbered out like drool. When I did notice them, they repelled me. Mostly these people were monstrous, elongated or compressed. Some were cross-hatched to invisibility, cross-hatched till the paper dissolved into wet lint on the desk. They were swollen of eyelid or lip, megalocephalic, haughty, moribund, manic, and mostly contemplative—lips shut, full-lidded eyes downcast, as serene as I was excited.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3467","value":3467},"note":null},{"text":"I loved bending my thoughts down that pen line and up, that weird trail connecting and separating the conscious and unconscious: the wiggly face half-fashioned, and the sly, full-fashioned, and fashioning hand.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3474","value":3474},"note":null},{"text":"And I realized then, with a draining jolt of superstitious dread, that I was seeing in the flesh someone I had once drawn. Someone I had once drawn with a ballpoint pen inside a matchbook, or on an overcrowded page, a scribbled face inside the lines of a photographed woman’s skirt. Now here was that face perfectly molded and fleshed in, as private as the drawing and as sad,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3478","value":3478},"note":null},{"text":"twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other’s socks.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3486","value":3486},"note":null},{"text":"thought, unfairly, of the Polyphemus moth crawling down the school’s driveway. Now we’d go, too.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3486","value":3486},"note":null},{"text":"had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world’s surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3494","value":3494},"note":null},{"text":"DREAM CONSISTS OF LITTLE MORE than its setting, as anyone knows who tells a dream or hears a dream told:","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3500","value":3500},"note":null},{"text":"The setting of our urgent lives is an intricate maze whose blind corridors we learn one by one—village street, ocean vessel, forested slope—without remembering how or where they connect in space.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3505","value":3505},"note":null},{"text":"The mountain rolls back from the floodplain and hides its own height in its trees.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3508","value":3508},"note":null},{"text":"You can see where the route ahead through the woods will cross a fire scar, will vanish behind a slide of shale, and perhaps reemerge there on that piny ridge now visible across the hanging valley—that ridge apparently inaccessible, but with a faint track that fingers its greenish spine.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3511","value":3511},"note":null},{"text":"if you pause in your daze to connect your own skull-locked and interior mumble with the skin of your senses and sense, and notice you are living,—then will you not conjure up in imagination a map or a globe and locate this low mountain ridge on it, and find on one western slope the dot which represents you walking here astonished?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3519","value":3519},"note":null},{"text":"You may then wonder where they have gone, those other dim dots that were you:","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3522","value":3522},"note":null},{"text":"On your mountain slope now you must take on faith that those apparently discrete dots of you were contiguous: that little earnest dot, so easily amused; that alien, angry adolescent; and this woman with loosening skin on bony hands, hands now fifteen years older than your mother’s hands when you pinched their knuckle skin into mountain ridges on an end table. You must take on faith that those severed places cohered, too—the dozens of desks, bedrooms, kitchens, yards, landscapes—if only through the motion and shed molecules of the traveler. You take it on faith that the multiform and variously lighted latitudes and longitudes were part of one world, that you didn’t drop chopped from house to house, coast to coast, life to life, but in some once comprehensible way moved there, a city block at a time, a highway mile at a time, a degree of latitude and longitude at a time,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3530","value":3530},"note":null},{"text":"You take it on faith, for the connections are down now, the trail grown over, the highway moved; you can’t remember despite all your vowing and memorization, and the way back is lost.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3537","value":3537},"note":null},{"text":"Your very cells have been replaced, and so have most of your feelings—except for two, two that connect back as far as you can remember.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3539","value":3539},"note":null},{"text":"up here at this high latitude, out here at the farthest exploratory tip of this my present bewildering age.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3554","value":3554},"note":null},{"text":"And still I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000W94GJ0&location=3554","value":3554},"note":null}]}