"Thomas Merton wrote, 'There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.'
There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.
It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.
I won't have it.
The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright.
We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have "not gone up into the gaps."
The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound.
The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery.
Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too.
Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock -- more than a maple -- a universe. This is how you spend the afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you."
Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Prufrock at Tinker Creek
Hi Lori,
Thanks for this great quote. As you've dared to mention one of my favourite poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", in a recent post of yours, I thought it would be interesting to contrast this passage with the attitude portrayed there:
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”
What do we have here? The same kind of themes are mentioned - biblical characters, raising the dead, prophets, but here the opposite conclusion is reached - it is not worth it (is it? Prufrock is not really that sure about anything...) "I do not think that they will sing for me" is one of his concluding, memorable lines.
Regards,
Tim Bourke
Thanks, Tim!
It's true, they are alike in being opposite! I thought she might even have had Prufrock in mind, just a little ("I never merited this grace...") But as usual, you have written it so clearly that I see the relationship much better now!
This poem is one of the few poems that I really soaked up in my youth and made it part of the way I see the world. Damn, it's depressing though!
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