An American Childhood

“When everything else has gone from my brain—the President's name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.”

Throughout the novel, Dillard uses the natural world to define her experiences and her own existence within, or in contrast with, the natural world. The memoir contains many descriptions of the land, and of Dillard’s experiences wandering in the woods or playing outside. Her relationship with the outdoors defines her childhood at least as much as her learning in school. The world, literally, was her playground and most important classroom.

“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.