A Southward Tide

Every now and again, a book tattoos itself on my life. I  hark back to the first time I read Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell or Rider Haggard, Richard Brautigan, Notes from the Underground, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Hernandez’ Piano Stories or The Master and Margarita. I filled journals with quotes. I thought, life will never be the same now that I know what literature has made possible, my perceptions shaded by the disclosures of fictional worlds. I recall the year, the mood, the mundane dramas of the period when I read such work, when Marquez murdered his protagonist, Santiago Nasar, in the first line of his novel or when Annie Dillard’s polyphemus moth began its infinite crawl down a winter drive.

I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in high school. A decade later, I remember two passages from her non-fiction account. In one instance, Dillard describes the histories of newly sighted patients, blind from birth, after the development of safe cataract operations – their wonder and confusion at the two-dimensional plane of color patches and textures where space, form and size are indistinguishable. Their perception seems akin to an acid trip. A twenty-two year old girl keeps her eyes shuts for two weeks. When she finally opens them, she “repeatedly exlaimed: ‘Oh God! How beautiful.'”

And then the next passage: the moth, the fateful cocoon brought prematurely to life by the hot hands of school children, born in a mason jar, its wings forever crumpled. Upon her memory is etched the image of the beautiful crippled moth hobbling towards its death down a cold long driveway. I still cry when I read those pages. It has been seared on my subconscious too. It pains me that she did not spare us her morbid image. I have my own horrors tucked away too – the corpse of the baby sparrow we snatched after its nest fell, despite my mother’s insistence that if we touched it its mama would never return, the beautiful subsaharan tortoise I named Henry dead on our hot Manhattan roof. All these things brought back to life by the polyphemus moth, our hearts burned by the same sad destiny.