{"id":12542,"date":"2026-03-07T21:17:57","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T01:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/annie-dillard-on-unselfconsciousness-the-marginalian-2\/"},"modified":"2026-03-07T21:17:57","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T01:17:57","slug":"annie-dillard-on-unselfconsciousness-the-marginalian-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/annie-dillard-on-unselfconsciousness-the-marginalian-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Annie Dillard on Unselfconsciousness \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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<\/a>Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York\u2019s most esteemed art schools, between beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was struck to see project after project take up as its subject the least durable, most illusory aspect of human existence: the self. Where was the Iris Murdoch in these dawning artists\u2019 lives to remind them that art, at its best, is \u201can occasion for unselfing\u201d<\/a>? And yet who could fault them: Not just their generation, but our entire culture seems to have forgotten that identities and opinions are the least interesting parts of people \u2014 ripples on the surface of the ocean of the soul, shimmering but shallow, pervious to every windsweep, irrelevant to the depths. <\/p>\n

I was suddenly reminded of an essay by Annie Dillard<\/a> from her 1974 masterpiece Pilgrim at Tinker Creek<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), which won her the Pulitzer Prize and which I revisit frequently as basic irrigation for the soul. Its subject is Dillard\u2019s experience of \u201cstalking\u201d a muskrat at Tinker Creek. Its object \u2014 like that of every Annie Dillard essay, of any great essay \u2014 is what it means to be alive. <\/p>\n

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Muskrat (Photograph: Tom Koerner\/USFWS)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

An epoch before it was imaginable that any fragment of the self could instantly face a worldwide mirror of millions, that any experience could be photographed and instantly become not only \u201ca commemoration of itself\u201d (as Italo Calvino so presciently put it<\/a>) but a commodification of an inner world traded for likes, Dillard writes:<\/p>\n

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In the forty minutes I watched [the muskrat], he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired with electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly; it is second nature to me now. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

After some passages bridging Heraclitus and Heisenberg in the virtuosic way that makes a piece of writing a symphony of thought and feeling, Dillard goes on to quote Martin Buber<\/a> quoting an old Kabbalah teacher:<\/p>\n

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When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A decade later, speaking<\/a> at Portland\u2019s wonderful Literary Arts<\/em>, she would hold up this passage as her favorite in her entire book. But I find her own words just as clarifying, just as sanctifying:<\/p>\n

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It is astonishing how many people cannot, or will not, hold still. I could not, or would not, hold still for thirty minutes inside, but at the creek I slow down, center down, empty.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies<\/em><\/a> by Ruth Krauss<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Long before neuroscience revealed how such moments quiet the activity of the brain\u2019s Default Mode Network and put us in a salutary state termed \u201csoft fascination,\u201d<\/a> Dillard describes that state from the inside:<\/p>\n

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I am not excited; my breathing is slow and regular. In my brain I am not saying, Muskrat! Muskrat! There! I am saying nothing. If I must hold a position, I do not \u201cfreeze.\u201d If I freeze, locking my muscles, I will tire and break. Instead of going rigid, I go calm. I center down wherever I am; I find a balance and repose. I retreat \u2014 not inside myself, but outside myself, so that I am a tissue of senses. Whatever I see is plenty, abundance. I am the skin of water the wind plays over; I am petal, feather, stone.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This, perhaps, is what Willa Cather meant in her perfect definition of happiness<\/a> as being \u201cdissolved into something complete and great\u201d that \u201ccomes as naturally as sleep\u201d \u2014 a dissolution of the self into the totality of Being, or what Transcendentalist queen Margaret Fuller called \u201cthe All\u201d in her own exquisite account of one such experience<\/a> a century and a half earlier. This, too, is the pulsating truth at the heart of Dillard\u2019s own oft-quoted insight \u2014 an indictment, today \u2014 that \u201chow we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Couple this small fragment of the infinitely soul-slaking Pilgrim at Tinker Creek<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with Loren Eiseley \u2014 another of humanity\u2019s greatest essayists \u2014 on the muskrat and the meaning of life<\/a>, then revisit Hermann Hesse on discovering the soul beneath the self<\/a> and Annie Dillard\u2019s classic meditation on the meaning of life lensed through a total solar eclipse<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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