An American Childhood

“Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well underway.”

In this passage Dillard, as the adult narrator, looks back on her childhood and considers the moment when children first awaken to themselves and to their relationship with the world. In some ways, Dillard indicates, they are strangers in a strange land. They do not remember how they got here, and they must simply keep moving forward into the future, living a life they do not remember creating. Dillard steps into her adult voice here, as she does in other places in the memoir, when she wishes to emphasize the endurance of particular ideas from childhood in her adult life.

“I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.”

Here Dillard espouses the philosophy of the mind that guides her developing consciousness, where constant self-awareness forces her to engage with her inner self and her responses to the outer world. Within this narrative, such self-awareness or wakefulness indicates that the child is growing into an adult. However, Dillard is also conscious that too much awareness may be overwhelming.

“Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.”

Dillard describes the act of self-awareness. This awakening to the world forms the central theme of the memoir and reveals Dillard’s maturity, as her perceptions move from her inner awareness to an increased understanding of the world around her.

“Adults were coming apart, but they never noticed nor minded. My revulsion was rude, so I hid it. Besides, we could never rise to the absolute figural splendor they alone could on occasion achieve. Our beauty was a mere absence of decrepitude; their beauty, when they had it, was not passive but earned; it was grandeur; it was a party to power, and to artifice, even, and to knowledge. Our beauty was, in the long run, merely elfin.”

The adult Dillard, as intrusive narrator, expounds on the graceful consciousness possible only through adult experience and knowledge of the world. The adult consciousness, having paid for itself in experience, wears down the body. Dillard’s childhood revulsion for the loose flesh on her mother’s hand, for example, brings with it a reminder that Dillard herself is heading for the same age as her mother. Time does not pass children by, and such adult awareness is only possible through maturity associated with experience in the world. The beauty of childhood, temporary and fleeting, lies in the very fact of its impermanence. 

“Her speech was an endlessly interesting, swerving path of old punch lines, heartfelt crises de coeur, puns new and old, dramatic true confessions, challenges, witty one-liners, wee Scotticisms, tag lines from Frank Sinatra songs, obsolete mountain nouns, and moral exhortations.”

Dillard’s immersion in language through her mother’s wordplay influenced her writer’s voice and vocabulary, and broadened the boundaries of her world through exposure to the language of various cultures. To Dillard, her mother’s imagination, laughter, and love provide a secure foundation for her own development as a woman and as a writer.

“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 as being chased all over Pittsburgh in the middle of winter—running terrified, exhausted—by this sainted, skinny, furious red-headed man who wished to have a word with us.”

Dillard throws herself at life headlong, just as she has been taught to do in football by the neighborhood boys. She repeatedly demonstrates this characteristic throughout the memoir. This episode demonstrates how all of the children and the adult man “play by the rules.” The angry adult yells at the children for their bad behavior, and the children accept that it is the adult’s right to correct them. It is an extension of the world of football and baseball games; everyone knows the rules and honors them.

“I was ten years old now, up into the double numbers, where I would likely remain till I died. I am awake now forever, I thought suddenly; I have converged with myself in the present. . . . I felt time in full stream, and I felt consciousness in full stream joining it, like the rivers.”

Here Dillard uses the metaphor of time as a river to describe her permanent, conscious awakening at age 10. This image, which unites nature and the individual consciousness, represents Dillard’s use of transcendental metaphors and concepts. She uses this particular metaphor, of time and consciousness united in a body of water, at several key points in the narrative.

“ ‘When you open a book,’ the sentimental library posters said, ‘anything can happen.’ This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.”

Here Dillard shares her childhood impatience to read only good books. Her impatience is only matched by her curiosity, so she continues to throw herself at books, one by one, discerning both the duds and the great ones. This headlong rush into various experiences characterizes Dillard’s approach to life. Whether she is learning to pitch a baseball or reading a book about nature, Dillard gives every pursuit her whole heart and all of her attention.

“Books swept me away, one after the other, this way and that; I made endless vows according to their lights, for I believed them.”

Dillard’s childhood is transformed by books. Books themselves make up a significant motif in this memoir; they represent knowledge, imagination, and access to one’s inner world. Books also represent truth for Dillard, along with being a significant gateway to a world beyond her neighborhood in Pittsburgh.

“What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think—the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn’t known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie’s rim as you climbed its cliffs. And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another. Knowledge wasn’t a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being—whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars.”

Dillard’s passion for learning and her natural curiosity coincide with her intellectual development. The metaphor of climbing a cliff compared to reading and learning from a book incorporates two significant themes: reading books allows Dillard to read the natural world, and learn from it. Here, too, she acknowledges her own limitations—she does not know how much she does not know until she discovers that the boundaries of her world are unlimited.

“You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.”

In this passage, Dillard attempts to fly. She knows in her head that she cannot fly and that people cannot fly, but she tries her best anyway. Out of an excess of energy and life, she flaps her arms valiantly and runs to the point of exhilarated exhaustion. 

“Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.”

Dillard’s mental awakening to the world accompanies her awareness of all that she, in her 13 years, has already forgotten. Having demonstrated that she is an avid collector, of rocks, of history, and of knowledge itself, she here bemoans the fact that she has lost the mental pictures of her own past. Dillard yearns to be a collector of life.

“She did not say, but I began to understand then, that you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself.”

Here Dillard speaks of her mother’s reaction to one of Dillard’s successful experiments. Though her mother praises her, she does not get up from the dinner table, where she sits talking with her husband, to view Dillard’s experiment. Dillard realizes now that she must provide her own admiration for her achievements.

“What does it feel like to be alive?

“Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!

“It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.”

Here Dillard explains her philosophy: people know they are alive through interaction and oneness with nature. Dillard’s theme echoes earlier American Transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of an oversoul. Additionally, Dillard expands on the theme of time flowing like a river.

“People’s being themselves, year after year, so powerfully and so obliviously—what was it? Why was it so appealing? Personality, like beauty, was a mystery; like beauty, it was useless. These useless things were not, however, flourishes and embellishments to our life here, but that life’s center; they were its truest note, the heart of its form, which drew back our thoughts repeatedly.”

As a 13-year-old, Dillard turns her study from rocks and books to the people around her. Though she continues to learn as much as possible about the natural world, the people who inhabit her world become much more interesting.

“I hated insects; that I knew. Fingering insects was touching the rim of a nightmare. But you have to study something. I never considered turning away from them just because I was afraid of them.”

In this passage, Dillard explains one of the ways that she was able to learn so much. Like a scientist, she forces herself to study and accept working with materials and creatures that frighten or disgust her. In this way, Dillard displays a mental toughness that would seem to be in contrast with her upbringing, which held few negative challenges.

“Hard work bore fruit. This is what we learned growing up in Pittsburgh, growing up in the United States.”

One of the traits most commonly associated with an “American” spirit is the notion that hard work results in success. Here, Dillard reiterates the idea that the path to success in America is related to hard individual effort.

“I had small experience of the evil hopelessness, pain, starvation, and terror the world spread about. I had barely seen people’s malice and greed. I believed in civilized countries torture had ended with the Enlightenment. Of nations’ cruel options I knew nothing. My optimism was endless: it grew sky-high within the narrow bounds of my isolationism.”

Here Dillard explains the America of the 1950s, with its post-WWII mythos. Having defeated the Nazis at great cost and effort, Americans turned to the gifts of optimism and happiness. Everyone wanted to forget the fear and sacrifice of the previous decade and enjoy the outcome of their previous labors. The children of this time, who did not remember the war years, were the beneficiaries of this rather idyllic time between WWII and the disillusionment of the Vietnam War.

“…what did I know of parting, of grieving, mourning, loss? Well, I knew one thing; I had known it all along. I knew it was the kicker. I knew life pulled you in two; you never healed. Mother’s emotions ran high, and she suffered sometimes from a web of terrors, because, she said, her father died when she was seven; she still missed him.”

Dillard understands that her own experience in the world is limited. Though she meets life headlong, she must experience more of life before she can understand death or its accompaniment, grief.

“It was clear that adults, including our parents, approved of children who read books, but it was not at all clear why this was so. Our reading was subversive, and we knew it. Did they think we read to improve our vocabularies? Did they want us to read and not pay the least bit of heed to what we read, as they wanted us to go to Sunday school and ignore what we heard?”

The full extent of adult hypocrisy concerning morals and the way to live with integrity drives the teenage Dillard’s rage.

“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. I couldn’t remember how to forget myself. I 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. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn't hush.

“So this was adolescence. 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 least 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? Was it all, the whole bright and various planet, where I had been so ardent about finding myself alive, only a passion peculiar to children, that I would outgrow even against my will?”

During her adolescence, Dillard loses herself for a while. Overtaken by rage alternating with boredom, she expresses the irony of her own existence through dangerous behaviors and challenges to authority in the form of the law, her parents, and her teachers.

“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.”

In the depths of Dillard’s adolescent rage, Emerson’s transcendental philosophy offers her a metaphysical explanation that she can hold on to, hope of a world she can understand and within which she can live. In fact, Dillard is a modern Transcendentalist; her writing adopts and reflects many of the concepts originally elucidated by Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman, the Transcendental triumvirate.

“I 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?”

Upon learning that she will be sent to Hollins College the next year, Dillard wonders what effect college will have on her. Knowing that the problem students from her private school are often sent there, Dillard imagines that she will end up polished and tamed, ready to take up her place in Pittsburgh society.