How sharing of findings affects practice Essay

Genuine case audits and requests are required to recognize how, when and why a youngster has kicked the bucket from misuse or disregard. These audits distinguish the manner by which associations and nearby experts have worked both together and independently to defend, secure and advance the government assistance of youngsters and youngsters. These surveys likewise help to recognize how these associations could have functioned better to guarantee that this doesn’t happen again to another youngster. Victoria Climbie was brought into the world second November 1991. She was brought to the UK in 1999 by her aunt, who the specialists thought was her mom, when she was 8 years of age. She experienced 128 wounds being beaten with sharp and heavy-handed tools and after Victoria’s posthumous was done, her reason for death was seen as hypothermia welcomed on by malnourishment and living in a sodden domain with confined development. Victoria’s Aunty was captured at the clinic on 25th February 2000 on doubt of disregard. Victoria had been a piece of multi organization youngster assurance plan and had visited and been visited by numerous clinics, social administrations groups, police and houses of worship before her demise on 25th February 2000 at only 8 years and 3 months old. All organizations included were too ready to even think about listening to her Aunties accounts of incontinence, ownership and social issues. The social administrations groups didn’t even follow up an exposure of sexual maltreatment towards Victoria with an examination after her Aunty withdrew the claims she had made towards her accomplice. All offices appeared to be exceptionally trusting of Victoria’s Aunty who was strengthened by her introduction and conduct. She co-worked with gatherings and visits from experts, started correspondence with experts and even reacted decidedly to offers of help. After Victoria’s demise all offices that were a piece of her short life inside the UK were investigated and were seen as ailing in association, exhaustiveness and inadequately centered around the child’s government assistance. The resultâ of the Victoria Climbie case implied a survey on the kid insurance plan. Professionals must be extra cautious when working with youngsters and need to guarantee they follow right strategies concerning defending and kid security. In the event that a youngster unveils data to an individual from staff they should record all data including the date and time that the kid revealed. This data will at that point be passed onto the executives who will contact and illuminate the right offices. 2.2 †Identify the approaches and strategies required in the work setting for protecting youngsters and youngsters. The approaches and strategies required inside the setting for shielding youngsters and youngsters are: Safeguarding and Child Protection This approach and strategy guarantees the security of the youngsters inside the setting concerning revelation, misuse and disregard. Specialists must follow the right system with respect to exposures from youngsters or occurrences saw. All specialists have a DBS check before having the option to work intimately with the kids to guarantee they are reasonable for the position. Wellbeing, Safety and Risk Assessment This approach guarantees that all wellbeing and wellbeing matters are tended to inside the setting so the youngsters are entering a protected and secure condition. Day by day chance evaluations are done to guarantee that all perils and dangers are limited or evacuated to guarantee the total wellbeing of the kids and youngsters inside the setting and its outside condition. Medical aid This approach and strategy guarantees that experts inside the setting are adequately prepared to manage medical aid to kids, youngsters and other staff individuals. Following the right methodology they should guarantee that an emergency treatment structure is rounded out incorporating all important data with regardsâ to the youngster. Information Protection This approach and strategy guarantees that all children’s and youthful people’s data is adequately put away inside the setting. It likewise expresses that professionals must not talk about nursery business outside of the setting.

Social issue Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Social issue - Essay Example Notwithstanding, in spite of these gay developments, gay relationships are as yet restricted in numerous states, society despite everything glares at and wavers toâ accept this ‘deviant’ gathering. To deny the gay couples the opportunity to wed and appreciate the full advantages of marriage as agreed to hetero couples is unjustified and baseless; in such manner, Gay relationships ought to be legitimized in all the states in the US to permit gay couples toâ get wedded without lawful or cultural limitations at all. The US constitution accommodates fairness and freedom concerning matters relating to marriage and family life-these rights have intricately been caught and ensured in the constitution. To deny gay couples an option to practice these equivalent rights accommodated in their own laws is absolutely segregation, and it ought not be supported. Gay couples have the right to appreciate the privileges of opportunity of decision concerning their sexual directions without segregation. Likewise, marriage is additionally one of the fundamental human rights, and in this manner, same sex or hetero marriage ought to be concurred to all, and various. Similarly as the interracial relationships, same sex relationships merit assurance, and ought not be oppressed denying same sex couples an option to wed is denying them their essential human right as accommodated in the constitution. Permitting same sex relationships will undoubtedly control significantly progressively other social issues, for example, prostitution, treachery, separate and the spread of illnesses, for example, HIV/AIDS examines have indicated that such indecencies have been on the decrease in numerous states that have sanctioned same sex relationships. For example, the province of Massachusetts enlisted a 21% drop in separate from rates in the wake of sanctioning gay relationships (â€Å"Should gay marriage be legal?†). In such manner, obviously as opposed to harming hetero relationships as it is generally dreaded, gay relationships will in reality help the marriage establishment

High School and Entering College Essay - 1100 Words

High School Graduates Should Take a Year off before Entering College (Essay Sample) Content: NameCourse numberInstructorà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬s nameDateHigh School Graduates Should Take a Year off before Entering CollegeMany students transit smoothly from high school to college. Most of them consider moving swiftly to college as the normal step to take after graduating from High school while others prefer to wait a while before enrolling into a college. Taking a transitional year before going to college has not been common in the US. However, recently, increased uptake of gap year has seen many programs that target such students experience a dip in their admission numbers. Students take a break before entering college for varying motivations. Some of the students have plans to travel abroad, explore careers, and engage in community service among others. It is vital that students take the gap year to reflect on their motivations before undertaking a particular career path, gain experience through employment and community service as well as seek additional financial su pport to support their college education.Taking a break before joining college is very essential in allowing students to explore their interests and refresh their skills. It in turn works to their advantage by preparing them for strong performance upon entering college. Research shows that students that take a break prior to enrolling to college outperform those who donà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬t. The gap year provides such students ample time to reflect on their interest in a particular field and ignites their excitement. Being excited about a particular course of study allows them to remain focused and increases their ability to focus. The gap year provides students with an opportunity to find direction and a sense of purpose. Students should consider taking a break to prepare better, develop the passion that is essential to be effective during the four college years. Taking a break allows students to clarify the career path they wish to pursue. Such clarity is crucial because it also saves m oney that could otherwise have been wasted in tuition for a career they are not sufficiently motivated to pursue.Gap years are important in helping students to gain experience that is essential in developing a smart, critical and innovative thinking frame during college and at work. Undertaking community volunteer work in non-profit organizations at home or in developing countries, working with grassroots youth and other community roles improve essential transferrable skills. Their volunteer experience helps them understand themselves better, their relationships and the world. It is necessary for deepening their capacity and perspective on effective citizenship. Undertaking work during a gap year challenges a studentà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬s knowledge and accelerates their development by upsetting previously held ideas. Taking opportunities where one lives with a different community provides students with valuable experiences that also help them to see the world from other peopleà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬s per spectives. Engaging in work or community service widens a studentà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬s scope of though by expanding their worldview. Classroom learning and venturing out through community service provides starkly different levels of intensity regarding questioning assumptions, inspiring critical self- reflection and cultivating ethical dispositions. A student stands to gain more breadth and instills a sense of independence. It enriches students thinking and strengthens their drive to engage in co-curricular activities, and undergraduate projects as they feel responsible for creating an impact in their society. Taking a gap year to work is thus very beneficial as students transfer their experience to their personal and professional aspects as well as prime them for leadership.Taking a break to obtain gainful employment can also develop a studentsà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬ capacity to mobilize finances for tuitions and other college costs. A student that works to save money for a year eases the financial burden of attending college. Finding work and residency in the state where one intends to attend college also offers more tuition savings. It may prove beneficial to learn of opportunities available directly with the college to slash the tuition fees once a student attends. Engaging in some work programs may also yield stipends and scholarships at the end of the program. When students undertake such programs, they stand to earn scholarships that could assist in financing their college education. They may be lucky to gain employment in some companies with strong retention policies such as providing tuition for its employees to undertake their studies. When students undertake a gap year and find employment in such companies, it is possible that the company may have plans to develop the capacity of its employees through employer aid that provide a grant to cover tuition. Working during a gap year also provides students with knowledge and skills to make money during their studies. S ome students can establish businesses that may flourish even upon entering college. It offers them the opportunity to mature, be independent and lessens the financial burden of college education using the profits from their businesses. Students also learn how to better manage their money as they prepare to join college and reduce wastage. Taking a break before going c...

Identifying The Impact of Employee Participation for Transparency in the Hiring Free Essay Example, 1750 words

Literature could be used to support the assertion that employee participation makes hiring and promotion both effectively transparent and efficient. It also improves a company s strategic plan revolves around the human person who is hired and promoted to various positions (Ryan and Bernard, 2003). In the course of hiring and promoting, therefore, it is always important to have a unique way of ensuring that the right persons are put at the right places so that the right and most desiring results can be achieved. Meanwhile, Employee Participation is a process, which gets employees, who are always the major stakeholders in hiring and promotion included in the processes. Subsequently, it is possible to get the most vital information from the very people who are concerned. A scenario can be cited as the Social Security Administration (SSA), an agency that needs to hire a Service Representative (SR), involving existing employees of the SR unit in the process. What happens is that because the employees of the SR unit have had some working experience and negative past hiring history with the company, they will be the best stakeholder to know the kind of qualities that need to be possessed by an applicant who wants to take up such a sensitive and important position. We will write a custom essay sample on Identifying The Impact of Employee Participation for Transparency in the Hiring or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/page There are enough primary and secondary data available that touch on the use of employee participation in organizations and what the impact of this process is. In a personalized primary research undertaken by the researcher, it was discovered that 80% of respondents indicated that they had witnessed a number of tremendous benefits in practicing employee involvement in the field of hiring and promotion.

Financial Ratios Have Proven To Be A Useful Tool For...

Financial ratios have proven to be a useful tool for effective financial management and planning. Primarily known for improving the understanding of financial results and trends over time, financial ratios are a unique way to provide a quantitative analysis to communicate overall organizational performance. This tool is useful for managers to focus in on the company’s strengths and weaknesses from which strategies and operations can be formed. Investors are also commonly known to use ratios to measure results against other companies to make appropriate judgments regarding management effectiveness and mission impact. For ratios to be deemed meaningful and useful, they require reliable and accurate calculated information. This is simple†¦show more content†¦2016 current ratio would also indicate an increase of $0.45 from 2015’s current asset to liabilities ratio. The second ratio (often viewed as more conservative than the current ratio) used to calculate the liq uidity of Starbucks was Cash Assets. A short-term creditor may be extremely interested in this ratio because it measures cash over current liabilities. After the calculation was performed, records indicate $0.47 in cash assets for every $1 in total liabilities. Cash assets also proved to have a $0.05 increase in cash assets from the previous year of 2015. The trend of Starbucks represents, in short, that Starbucks current ratio deteriorated from 2015 to 2016, and their cash assets slightly improved from 2015 to 2016. SOLVENCY Solvency is another word for debt management when discussing financial statements. Simply put, ratios used in a solvent manner, measures a company’s ability to meet its obligations or its financial leverage. Companies are encouraged to be mindful of their financial leverage ratios as to keep their financial risk at an acceptable level (2014, pp. 512). 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Racism4 Essay Example For Students

Racism4 Essay * * *A simple friend has never seen you cry. * *A real friend has shoulders soggy from your tears. * *A simple friend doesnt know your parents first names. * *A real friend has their phone numbers in his address book. * *A simple friend brings a bottle of wine to your party. * *A real friend comes early to help you cook and stays late to* *A simple friend hates it when you call after he has gone to* *A real friend asks you why you took so long to call. * *A simple friend seeks to talk with you about your problems. * *A real friend seeks to help you with your problems. * *A simple friend wonders about your romantic history. * *A real friend could blackmail you with it. * *A simple friend, when visiting, acts like a guest. * *A real friend opens your refrigerator and helps himself. * *A simple friend thinks the friendship is over when you have* *A real friend knows that its not a friendship until after youve* *A simple friend expects you to always be there for them. * *A real friend expects to always be there for you!* *Pass this on to anyone you care about. If you get it back you have? *found your true friends! A ball is a circle, No beginning, no end. * *It keeps us together, Like our Circle of Friends, But the treasure* insidefor you to see is the treasure of friendship? Today I pass the friendship ball to you. Pass it* onto someone who is a friend to you.. Bibliography:

Us Drug Policy Essays - Drug Control Law, Drug Policy,

Us Drug Policy Q. Would the Amsterdam model be a useful government response to hallucinogen and marijuana use in this country? Why or why not? Amsterdam's coffee shops and cafes are notorious for the tolerated exchange of hashish and marijuana. This example goes completely against the moral principles underlying the United States drug policy. The United States drug policy stands by the zero tolerance rules. Our drug culture does not believe in any such thing as a use of an illegal drug, only abuse. So, why aren't the Dutch facing as many drug related problems as we are? Is a more laissez-faire approach to drugs the answer? We aren't winning the war on drugs. It is clear that the illegal drug use and drug related problems have increased in the United States. I think that the Amsterdam model may act a useful government response to hallucinogen and marijuana use in the United States. We have tried everything from stricter punishments to spending more dollars on drug prevention programs. The anti-drug law has led to the criminalization of more drugs and the imprisonment of more drug users. The cost of prohibition of drugs is getting pricier every year. Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar stated, ?The arrest of more than 300,000 people a year on marijuana charges contributes the clogging of courts and the overcrowding of prisons. Federal, state, and local governments now spend nearly ten billion dollars a year on drug enforcement and hundreds of millions more to house and feed drug dealers and users in local, state and federal prisons?(80). The drug related problems are increasing rather than decreasing. Isn 't it time that we searched for a better alternative to fighting the war on drugs. I am not saying that legalizing all drugs is the solution. I definitely don't believe that legalizing all drugs would work in our society. I don't think that our society is mature enough to handle the responsibilities that go along with some of the hard drugs. The Dutch policy has come to accept that people are going to use soft drugs. Why not regulate the exchange of these drugs? The Dutch policy refers to this regulation as a ?house dealer? with a more controllable business instead of the dangerous ?black market?. The Public Prosecutions Office has drawn up a guideline for the operation of coffee shops: no sales of cannabis over 5 grammes; no sales of hard drugs or alcohol; no sales to minors; no advertising of the use of soft drugs and no nuisance. The Dutch drug policy bases their tolerance of certain drugs by the risks associated with them. Instead we group all of the illegal drugs together, suggesting that they are all dangerous and addictive. When in fact that is not the case. Some drugs aren't even dangerous and can be helpful with responsible use. Our culture is so uptight about the use of all drugs. We aren't even willing to see the positive effects that they may bring. One plausible explanation that the United States has for not following the Dutch policy is that using these softer drugs will lead to the use and addiction of harder drugs. When in fact studies have shown that despite the tolererant policies in Amsterdam, most Dutch don't try cannabis and even those who do try it usually don't continue using it often, much less harder drugs. Amsterdam serves as a good role model for the United States. Amsterdam proved that a self-governing society is able to handle a drug problem in an inexpensive more practical way. Prohibition isn't the solution to our on going battle with drugs. When are we going to search for a more practical and efficient way to handle our long overdue drug problem? Sociology Essays

17 Creative Ways to Celebrate a College Birthday

17 Creative Ways to Celebrate a College Birthday Celebrating a birthday is a great chance to take a break from the usual rigors of college life. Of course, planning a birthday celebration might seem time-consuming or expensive, but it doesnt have to be. Even in the smallest of college towns, there are probably plenty of events you can turn into a birthday outing (that dont include the traditional group outing to a restaurant). Here are some ideas that can work with a variety of schedules and budgets. 1. Go to a Museum Youre in college and its your birthday - be as nerdy as you want. Head to an art museum, a museum of natural history, a local aquarium or whatever youll find most enjoyable. Museums can be a great way to take a break from the chaos of college while still doing something interesting and engaging. (Remember to bring your ID ask about a student discount.) 2. Attend (or Participate in) a Poetry Slam Whether you just want to watch or are interested in performing, poetry slams can be a lot of fun. See whats happening on your campus or in your community and enjoy a fun evening out that promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience. 3. Do Something Physical If you want to do something physical for your birthday, get creative. See if a local gym offers special classes, like aerial yoga or a ropes course you can do with your friends. Some community organizations also offer really zany classes, like bungee jumping, skydiving or even circus-training classes. Given how much you sit in class and study all day, pushing your body to its limits can be a great way to celebrate getting older. 4. Go to the Movies Catching up on the latest movies can be a fun way to spend an afternoon - or even a morning. Mix things up a bit and grab breakfast and a movie with some friends to start your birthday off in a fun, nontraditional, but still enjoyable way. 5. Head to an Athletic Game It could be a hockey game in your college town, a football game on your campus or something small like your friends intramural rugby game. Regardless, rooting for your team and hanging out with a large crowd just might be what you need for a birthday celebration. Treat yourself to something from the concession stand or pack snacks to give the event a more celebratory feel. 6. Celebrate With Some Time Alone College is fun, but there arent t a lot of opportunities to enjoy solitude. Doing something quiet - whether its on campus or away - like getting a massage, going for a long run or meditating can be rejuvenating, if not downright healthy for you. 7. Treat Yourself to Some Self-Care   Students spend a lot of time focusing on external things - class requirements, jobs, cocurricular obligations - and they sometimes forget to focus a little on themselves. Treat yourself to something that focuses on you for a change, like a pedicure and a wax or a haircut and a shave. You can even call ahead to see if your friends can make appointments with you. 8. Head Out for a Brewery Tour If youre over 21 (or turning 21), consider going on a brewery or distillery tour. In addition to learning all kinds of interesting facts about how beverages are made, youll get some free samples and enjoy an afternoon doing something that you might otherwise not have done. 9. Get a Behind-the-Scenes Look at Your Favorite Local Destination Not everyone knows that, for example, you can get a tour of major league baseball stadiums or the local zoo. See whats open during your birthday and what you can arrange in advance. 10. Go Home   Theres nothing wrong with ditching your hectic campus life and heading home for your own bed, your familys home cooking and some good ol RR. You work hard in college and treating yourself to the luxuries of home, however simple they may be, is a great way to reward yourself. 11. Do Something Quiet on Campus Planning an off-campus adventure can be stressful - not what you need on your birthday. Dont be shy about spending some quiet time on campus, going for a walk or run, journaling or hanging out in a coffee shop. 12. Do Something Romantic With Your Partner If youre dating and your partner is around, try to spend the day doing something romantic together. Sure, heading out to dinner is nice, but dont be afraid to mix it up a little, too. Head to a nearby town and go exploring. Do something new youve never done together. Make a scavenger hunt for each other. No matter what you end up doing, just enjoy each others company. 13. Celebrate at a Big Campus Party So the biggest fraternity on campus is throwing their biggest party of the year smack dab on your birthday. Just because they didnt plan it that way doesnt mean you cant take advantage of the situation. Let everyone elses hard work be your  birthday gift! 14. Spend Some Quality Time With a Few Good Friends Many people make lifelong friends in college. If you already know who these people are going to be, get em together and do something simple but enjoyable. Plan a picnic, go for a hike, coordinate a game night or spend time doing something creative together. 15. Volunteer Off Campus   Think about how you feel after you volunteer. You always finish feeling amazing, proud, humbled, energized and overall awesome, right? Well, why not treat yourself to that rock-star feeling on your birthday? Grab some friends and find a place to volunteer where you can work together and support a great cause. 16. Dont Do Any Homework You have 364 other days to focus on homework. Plan your time wisely in advance so that you dont have to do any homework on your birthday. After all, when was the last time you didnt even think about reading, writing a paper, doing a lab report or researching a project? If you plan well enough in advance, you can enjoy the day by letting your brain not even think (or feel guilty!) about completely avoiding your homework situation. 17. Do Something Creative You can easily fall into the routine of only producing creative pieces when you need to for a class or club requirement. On your birthday, however, treat yourself to doing something creative just for the sake of being creative.

To what extent was the March 1968 reevaluation of the Vietnam War, as Coursework

To what extent was the March 1968 reevaluation of the Vietnam War, as a function of Cold War ideology, accomplished to satisfy domestic concerns rather than international concerns - Coursework Example The fight angered the people back in the states as the promise of the war ending had been breached and the confidence of the administration had dwindled completely. The people wanted more than ever for the war to end and not to continue with retaliation which would mean addition of more troops. The President’s declaration of the war ending in March of 1968 was therefore made to calm the people down and fulfill their wishes even though the international concern would loom over the decision. The best international course of action and which was being recommended by the general was addition of more soldiers but this would divide the nation even further than it already was and hence the president ended the war. The end of the war satisfied the people but they still lacked trust in their president and he decided not to seek re-election having let down the

To analyze Michael Sandel's argument in The Case against Perfection Essay

To analyze Michael Sandel's argument in The Case against Perfection and make and argue a claim about it - Essay Example Enhancements are furthermore self-defeating to the human appreciation of natural abilities and the cultivation of talents in his view. Sandel argues that human appreciation of life comes from the fact that there is an unequal, apparently random gift of talents, advantages, and disadvantages in the social context that makes life meaningful through patterns of difference. He holds that inequalities in natural ability and skill that make some unfortunate and others lucky allow people to be compassionate, as there is an equally likely chance that they would have had the same fate. When genetic enhancements diminish the differences in talent, Sandel states that the individual’s success depends solely on whether or not the person has made the right decision ethically, and through this personal â€Å"responsibility expands to daunting proportions.† (Sandel, 87) In criticism, it is difficult to reconcile the arguments of Sandel against genetic engineering when deconstructing th e logic he uses with regard to pharmaceutical medications such as the use of Ritalin to improve academic performance. Since Ritalin does not affect the apparent telos of academic performance and focuses all of one’s learning ability, reducing contingencies unrelated to education or healing the mind of ADD, it is not clear why does Sandel not regard it in the same manner as he does running shoes. Furthermore, in his â€Å"Chariots of Fire† example, even Sandel concedes that finding the exact telos for personal interpretation within a complex system of competing philosophies is sometimes difficult for the individual and subjective. Thus, the telos of an action may be very different in the views of different people. In this example, Sandel is rejecting Ritalin not on the logic of telos as related to healing but on the preservation of inequality as he defines the morality. Because, in his view, only the differences among people allow them to appreciate life, and due to the ambiguity of telos as he defines it with subjective bias and interpretation at its root, Sandel’s argument against genetic engineering is less about telos and perfection and more a case against equality in society when assisted by technology. The logic of this argument is not consistent with the evolutionary changes of human consciousness, nor does it represent the new paradigm of human civilization represented by the Information Age. Sandel titles his book â€Å"The Case Against Perfection† in order to show his stance against the â€Å"Promethean aspiration to remake† human nature. (Sandel, 26) He argues for a concept of the giftedness of life opposed to genetic enhancements by stating that as people begin to enhance themselves to the limits of engineering, the variability in human talents decrease collectively and the playing field is leveled. Though it is important to note that differences between the choices that people make still exist, â€Å"we [would] a ttribute less to chance and more to choice,† and personal responsibility would increase to daunting proportions as people become ethically and morally responsible for every aspect of their lives. (Sandel, 87) Yet even though he fears that genetic enhancements would position too much pressure on the individual’s decisions, Sandel is fully in support of healing the unfortunate. The problem lies in that allowing the healing of the unfortunate implies that same normalization of abilities that enhancement does. Once Tiger Woods has the same perfect eyesight as other golfers

The American Exchange Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

The American Exchange - Term Paper Example The American exchange was influenced not only by Europe and Africa, but also by Asia. Moreover, it had an effect on the Asian commerce. The American exchange not only led to commercial growth but also had impacts on environmental and demographic changes1. Discussion Colonialism had a great impact on the American exchange between 1500 and 1800. The kingdoms of Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, France and Dutch each sought to gather wealth for their countries through colonies and advantageous oversees trading arrangements2. This also involved frustrating ambitious rivals from doing the same. In the American exchange, America was the colony, which included the entire western hemisphere. This area attracted a lot of interest because of the sugar islands of West Indies and the silver mines located in New Spain and Peru3. The triangular trade between America, Europe and Africa marked the beginning of the American exchange. According to this triangle, colonies from eastern America furnished t he raw materials while West Africa provided the labor needed to produce these raw materials. The mother country would in turn ship these manufactured products to both countries, that is, America and Africa. This partly led to the American Revolution as they protested against the colonial countries as they took raw materials from them, made them into finished products and then sold them at higher prices4. The Atlantic commerce paradigm takes into account coastal inhabitants of the three continents as they exchanged people and goods. In the Atlantic scheme, historians look at the contribution of the African kingdoms to the slave trade with Africans comprising a higher number of transatlantic immigrants compared to Europeans. The Atlantic commerce scheme also takes into account the Indian nations. The Indians supplied the American regions with skins and fur while they consumed manufactured goods and alcohol from the American regions. The Indian nations also introduced new agricultural products to the American farmers. Indian populations were also an important source of cultural identity and labor in some American regions. The Indians were able, until eighteenth century, to keep the colonialists at the coastal regions and away from the American continent5. Short-term consequences of American exchange The commercial system that existed at this period, with America producing the raw materials and colonial government selling them the finished products, led to the American Revolution. This was mainly due to the taxes on products such as tea, British manufactured goods and sugar products. There were protests by the consumers of the products6. The consumers could relate to the problems associated with goods from the empire. They were seen as a means of the colonial government exerting their rule on the American region. This was especially problematic considering they did not have representation in parliament back in London. Their mass consumption led to resisting of sta mp, sugar and Townshend acts7. They also boycotted tea and pledged non-importation, ultimately declaring independence. The principle of demand and supply is credited as responsible for the revolution and independence as it placed them at par with the colonial governments. The American colonies mobilized in an attempt to put an end to imperial state meddling, which would

Essay --

  Barbie is a fashion doll manufactured by the American toy-company Mattel, Inc. and launched in March 1959. American businesswoman Ruth Handler is credited with the creation of the doll using a German doll called Bild Lilli as her inspiration. Barbie is the figurehead of a brand of Mattel dolls and accessories, including other family members and collectible dolls. Barbie has been an important part of the toy fashion doll market for over fifty years, and has been the subject of numerous controversies and lawsuits, often involving parody of the doll and her lifestyle. History Ruth Handler watched her daughter Barbara play with paper dolls, and noticed that she often enjoyed giving them adult roles. At the time, most children's toy dolls were representations of infants. Realizing that there could be a gap in the market, Handler suggested the idea of an adult-bodied doll to her husband Elliot, a co-founder of the Mattel toy company. He was unenthusiastic about the idea, as were Mattel's directors. During a trip to Europe in 1956 with her children Barbara and Kenneth, Ruth Handler came across a German toy doll called Bild Lilli. The adult-figured doll was exactly what Handler had in mind, so she purchased three of them. She gave one to her daughter and took the others back to Mattel. The Lilli doll was based on a popular character appearing in a comic strip drawn by Reinhard Beuthin for the newspaper Die Bild-Zeitung. Lilli was a blonde bombshell, a working girl who knew what she wanted and was not above using men to get it. The Lilli doll was first sold in Germany in 1955, and although it was initially sold to adults, it became popular with children who enjoyed dressing her up in outfits that were available separately. Upon her retu... ...and share "America's favorite cookie." As had become the custom, Mattel manufactured both a white and a black version. Critics argued that in the African American community, Oreo is a derogatory term meaning that the person is "black on the outside and white on the inside," like the chocolate sandwich cookie itself. The doll was unsuccessful and Mattel recalled the unsold stock, making it sought after by collectors. In May 1997, Mattel introduced Share a Smile Becky, a doll in a pink wheelchair. Kjersti Johnson, a 17-year-old high school student in Tacoma, Washington with cerebral palsy, pointed out that the doll would not fit into the elevator of Barbie's $100 Dream House. Mattel announced that it would redesign the house in the future to accommodate the doll. In March 2000 stories appeared in the media claiming that the hard vinyl used in vintage Barbie dolls could Essay --   Barbie is a fashion doll manufactured by the American toy-company Mattel, Inc. and launched in March 1959. American businesswoman Ruth Handler is credited with the creation of the doll using a German doll called Bild Lilli as her inspiration. Barbie is the figurehead of a brand of Mattel dolls and accessories, including other family members and collectible dolls. Barbie has been an important part of the toy fashion doll market for over fifty years, and has been the subject of numerous controversies and lawsuits, often involving parody of the doll and her lifestyle. History Ruth Handler watched her daughter Barbara play with paper dolls, and noticed that she often enjoyed giving them adult roles. At the time, most children's toy dolls were representations of infants. Realizing that there could be a gap in the market, Handler suggested the idea of an adult-bodied doll to her husband Elliot, a co-founder of the Mattel toy company. He was unenthusiastic about the idea, as were Mattel's directors. During a trip to Europe in 1956 with her children Barbara and Kenneth, Ruth Handler came across a German toy doll called Bild Lilli. The adult-figured doll was exactly what Handler had in mind, so she purchased three of them. She gave one to her daughter and took the others back to Mattel. The Lilli doll was based on a popular character appearing in a comic strip drawn by Reinhard Beuthin for the newspaper Die Bild-Zeitung. Lilli was a blonde bombshell, a working girl who knew what she wanted and was not above using men to get it. The Lilli doll was first sold in Germany in 1955, and although it was initially sold to adults, it became popular with children who enjoyed dressing her up in outfits that were available separately. Upon her retu... ...and share "America's favorite cookie." As had become the custom, Mattel manufactured both a white and a black version. Critics argued that in the African American community, Oreo is a derogatory term meaning that the person is "black on the outside and white on the inside," like the chocolate sandwich cookie itself. The doll was unsuccessful and Mattel recalled the unsold stock, making it sought after by collectors. In May 1997, Mattel introduced Share a Smile Becky, a doll in a pink wheelchair. Kjersti Johnson, a 17-year-old high school student in Tacoma, Washington with cerebral palsy, pointed out that the doll would not fit into the elevator of Barbie's $100 Dream House. Mattel announced that it would redesign the house in the future to accommodate the doll. In March 2000 stories appeared in the media claiming that the hard vinyl used in vintage Barbie dolls could

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

annie dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for Richard It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out. —HERACLITUS Contents Epigraph 1 Heaven and Earth in Jest iii 3 2 Seeing 16 3 Winter 37 4 The Fixed 55 5 Untying the Knot 73 6 The Present 78 7 Spring 105 8 Intricacy 124 9 Flood 149 10 Fecundity 161 11 Stalking 184 12 Nightwatch 209 13 The Horns of the Altar 225 14 Northing 247 15 The Waters of Separation 265 Afterword 278 More Years Afterward 283 About Annie Dillard 285 About the Author Other Books By Annie Dillard Cover CopyrightAbout the Publisher Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 1 Heaven and Earth in Jest I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I’d half-awaken. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his b ack, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never 4 / Annie Dillard knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover.We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence†¦. â€Å"Seem like we’re just set down here,† a woman said to me recently, à ¢â‚¬Å"and don’t nobody know why. † These are morning matters, pictures you dream as the final wave heaves you up on the sand to the bright light and drying air. You remember pressure, and a curved sleep you rested against, soft, like a scallop in its shell. But the air hardens your skin; you stand; you leave the lighted shore to explore some dim headland, and soon you’re lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing.I still think of that old tomcat, mornings, when I wake. Things are tamer now; I sleep with the window shut. The cat and our rites are gone and my life is changed, but the memory remains of something powerful playing over me. I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing. If I’m lucky I might be jogged awake by a strange bird call. I dress in a hurry, imagining the yard flapping with auks, or flamingos. This morning it was a wood duck, down at the creek. It flew away. I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blu e Ridge.An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks—Tinker and Carvin’s—are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 5 hat providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection. The mountains—Tinker and Brushy, McAfee’s Knob and Dead Man—are a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will.The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home. The wood duck flew away. I caught only a glimpse of something like a bright torpedo that blasted the leaves where it flew. Back at the house I ate a bowl of oatmeal; much later in the day came the long slant of light that means good walking. If the day is fine, any walk will do; it all looks good. Water in particular looks its best, reflecting blue sky in the flat, and chopping it into graveled shallows and white chute and foam in the riffles. On a dark day, or a hazy one, everything’s washed-out and lackluster but the water.It carries its own lights. I set out for the railroad tracks, for the hill the floc ks fly over, for the woods where the white mare lives. But I go to the water. Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet. Kazantzakis says that when he was young he had a canary and a globe. When he freed the canary, it would perch on the globe and sing.All his life, wandering the earth, he felt as though he had a canary on top of his mind, singing. West of the house, Tinker Creek makes a sharp loop, so 6 / Annie Dillard that the creek is both in back of the house, south of me, and also on the other side of the road, north of me. I like to go north. There the afternoon sun hits the creek just right, deepening the reflected blue and lighting the sides of trees on the banks. Steers from the pasture across the creek come down to drink; I always f lush a rabbit or two there; I sit on a fallen trunk in the shade and watch the squirrels in the sun.There are two separated wooden fences suspended from cables that cross the creek just upstream from my tree-trunk bench. They keep the steers from escaping up or down the creek when they come to drink. Squirrels, the neighborhood children, and I use the downstream fence as a swaying bridge across the creek. But the steers are there today. I sit on the downed tree and watch the black steers slip on the creek bottom. They are all bred beef: beef heart, beef hide, beef hocks. They’re a human product like rayon. They’re like a field of shoes.They have cast-iron shanks and tongues like foam insoles. You can’t see through to their brains as you can with other animals; they have beef fat behind their eyes, beef stew. I cross the fence six feet above the water, walking my hands down the rusty cable and tightroping my feet along the narrow edge of the planks. When I hit th e other bank and terra firma, some steers are bunched in a knot between me and the barbedwire fence I want to cross. So I suddenly rush at them in an enthusiastic sprint, flailing my arms and hollering, â€Å"Lightning! Copperhead! Swedish meatballs! They flee, still in a knot, stumbling across the flat pasture. I stand with the wind on my face. When I slide under a barbed-wire fence, cross a field, and run over a sycamore trunk felled across the water, I’m on a little island shaped like a tear in the middle of Tinker Creek. On one side of the creek is a steep forested bank; the water is swift and deep on that side of the island. On the other side is the level field I walked Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 7 through next to the steers’ pasture; the water between the field and the island is shallow and sluggish.In summer’s low water, flags and bulrushes grow along a series of shallow pools cooled by the lazy current. Water striders patrol the surface film, crayfish hu mp along the silt bottom eating filth, frogs shout and glare, and shiners and small bream hide among roots from the sulky green heron’s eye. I come to this island every month of the year. I walk around it, stopping and staring, or I straddle the sycamore log over the creek, curling my legs out of the water in winter, trying to read. Today I sit on dry grass at the end of the island by the slower side of the creek. I’m drawn to this spot.I come to it as to an oracle; I return to it as a man years later will seek out the battlefield where he lost a leg or an arm. A couple of summers ago I was walking along the edge of the island to see what I could see in the water, and mainly to scare frogs. Frogs have an inelegant way of taking off from invisible positions on the bank just ahead of your feet, in dire panic, emitting a froggy â€Å"Yike! † and splashing into the water. Incredibly, this amused me, and, incredibly, it amuses me still. As I walked along the grassy e dge of the island, I got better and better at seeing frogs both in and out of the water.I learned to recognize, slowing down, the difference in texture of the light reflected from mud bank, water, grass, or frog. Frogs were flying all around me. At the end of the island I noticed a small green frog. He was exactly half in and half out of the water, looking like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didn’t jump. He didn’t jump; I crept closer. At last I knelt on the island’s winter killed grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in the creek just four feet away. He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag.The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin 8 / Annie Dillard emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and ru mple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag started to sink.I had read about the giant water bug, but never seen one. â€Å"Giant water bug† is really the name of the creature, which is an enormous, heavy-bodied brown bug. It eats insects, tadpoles, fish, and frogs. Its grasping forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes a victim with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the only bite it ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim’s muscles and bones and organs—all but the skin—and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim’s body, reduced to a juice.This event is quite common in warm fresh water. The frog I saw was being sucked by a giant water bug. I had been kneeling on the island grass; when the unrecognizable flap of frog skin settled on the creek bottom, swaying, I stood up and brushed the knees of my pants. I couldn’t catch my breath. Of course, many carnivorous animals devour their prey alive. The usual method seems to be to subdue the victim by downing or grasping it so it can’t flee, then eating it whole or in a series of bloody bites. Frogs eat everything whole, stuffing prey into their mouths with their thumbs.People have seen frogs with their wide jaws so full of live dragonflies they couldn’t close them. Ants don’t even have to catch their prey: in the spring they swarm over newly hatched, featherless birds in the nest and eat them tiny bite by bite. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 9 That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But a t the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, â€Å"The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest? † It’s a good question.What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator’s, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? God is subtle,† Einstein said, â€Å"but not malicious. † Again, Einstein said that â€Å"nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning. † It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God â€Å"set bars and doors† and said, â€Å"Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further. † But have we come even that far?Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat? Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who? ), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a 10 / Annie Dillard traight vertical de scent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star. The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass.I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. Another time I saw another wonder: sharks off the At lantic coast of Florida. There is a way a wave rises above the ocean horizon, a triangular wedge against the sky. If you stand where the ocean breaks on a shallow beach, you see the raised water in a wave is translucent, shot with lights.One late afternoon at low tide a hundred big sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a feeding frenzy. As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six-or eight-footlong bodies of twisting sharks. The sharks disappeared as each wave rolled toward me; then a new wave would swell above the horizon, containing in it, like scorpions in amber, sharks that roiled and heaved. The sight held awesome wonders: power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence. We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous vents are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 11 millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammer ed out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, â€Å"Come down to the water. † It was an extravagant gesture, but we can’t do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has een on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames. I have come to the grassy island late in the day. The creek is up; icy water sweeps under the sycamore log bridge. The frog skin, of course, is utterly gone. I have stared at that one spot on the creek bottom for so long, focusing past the rush of water, that when I stand, the opposite bank seems to stretch before my eyes and flow grassily upstream.When the bank settles down I cross the sycamore log and enter again the big plowed field next to the steers’ pasture. The wind is terrific out of the west; the sun comes and goes. I can see the shadow on the field before me deepen uniformly and spread like a plague. Everything seems so dull I am 12 / Annie Dillard amazed I can even distinguish objects. And suddenly the light runs across the land like a comber, and up the trees, a nd goes again in a wink: I think I’ve gone blind or died. When it comes again, the light, you hold your breath, and if it stays you forget about it until it goes again.It’s the most beautiful day of the year. At four o’clock the eastern sky is a dead stratus black flecked with low white clouds. The sun in the west illuminates the ground, the mountains, and especially the bare branches of trees, so that everywhere silver trees cut into the black sky like a photographer’s negative of a landscape. The air and the ground are dry; the mountains are going on and off like neon signs. Clouds slide east as if pulled from the horizon, like a tablecloth whipped off a table. The hemlocks by the barbed-wire fence are flinging themselves east as though their backs would break.Purple shadows are racing east; the wind makes me face east, and again I feel the dizzying, drawn sensation I felt when the creek bank reeled. At four-thirty the sky in the east is clear; how coul d that big blackness be blown? Fifteen minutes later another darkness is coming overhead from the northwest; and it’s here. Everything is drained of its light as if sucked. Only at the horizon do inky black mountains give way to distant, lighted mountains—lighted not by direct illumination but rather paled by glowing sheets of mist hung before them. Now the blackness is in the east; verything is half in shadow, half in sun, every clod, tree, mountain, and hedge. I can’t see Tinker Mountain through the line of hemlock, till it comes on like a streetlight, ping, ex nihilo. Its sandstone cliffs pink and swell. Suddenly the light goes; the cliffs recede as if pushed. The sun hits a clump of sycamores between me and the mountains; the sycamore arms light up, and I can’t see the cliffs. They’re gone. The pale network of sycamore arms, which a second ago was transparent as a screen, is suddenly Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 13 opaque, glowing with light.Now t he sycamore arms snuff out, the mountains come on, and there are the cliffs again. I walk home. By five-thirty the show has pulled out. Nothing is left but an unreal blue and a few banked clouds low in the north. Some sort of carnival magician has been here, some fasttalking worker of wonders who has the act backwards. â€Å"Something in this hand,† he says, â€Å"something in this hand, something up my sleeve, something behind my back†¦Ã¢â‚¬  and abracadabra, he snaps his fingers, and it’s all gone. Only the bland, blank-faced magician remains, in his unruffled coat, bare handed, acknowledging a smattering of baffled applause.When you look again the whole show has pulled up stakes and moved on down the road. It never stops. New shows roll in from over the mountains and the magician reappears unannounced from a fold in the curtain you never dreamed was an opening. Scarves of clouds, rabbits in plain view, disappear into the black hat forever. Presto chango. The audience, if there is an audience at all, is dizzy from head-turning, dazed. Like the bear who went over the mountain, I went out to see what I could see. And, I might as well warn you, like the bear, all that I could see was the other side of the mountain: more of same.On a good day I might catch a glimpse of another wooded ridge rolling under the sun like water, another bivouac. I propose to keep here what Thoreau called â€Å"a meteorological journal of the mind,† telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead. I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment.He hasn’t the 14 / Annie Dillard faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will ha ve learned instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why. So I think about the valley. It is my leisure as well as my work, a game.It is a fierce game I have joined because it is being played anyway, a game of both skill and chance, played against an unseen adversary—the conditions of time—in which the payoffs, which may suddenly arrive in a blast of light at any moment, might as well come to me as anyone else. I stake the time I’m grateful to have, the energies I’m glad to direct. I risk getting stuck on the board, so to speak, unable to move in any direction, which happens enough, God knows; and I risk the searing, exhausting nightmares that plunder rest and fo rce me face down all night long in some muddy ditch seething with hatching insects and crustaceans.But if I can bear the nights, the days are a pleasure. I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell. I am an explorer, then, and I am also a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself. Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves â€Å"lightning marks,† because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees.The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 15 dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow in to whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. Something pummels us, something barely sheathed. Power broods and lights.We’re played on like a pipe; our breath is not our own. James Houston describes two young Eskimo girls sitting cross-legged on the ground, mouth on mouth, blowing by turns each other’s throat cords, making a low, unearthly music. When I cross again the bridge that is really the steers’ fence, the wind has thinned to the delicate air of twilight; it crumples the water’s skin. I watch the running sheets of light raised on the creek’s surface. The sight has the appeal of the purely passive, like the racing of light under clouds on a field, the beautiful dream at the moment of being dreamed.The breeze is the merest puff, but you yourself sail headlong and breathless under the gale force of the sp irit. 2 Seeing When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always â€Å"hid† the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk.Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 17 I wou ld be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.It is still the first week in January, and I’ve got great plans. I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight of a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way?It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get. I used to be able to see flying insects in the air. I’d look ahead and see, not the row of hemlocks across the road, but the air in front of it. My eyes would focus along that column of air, picking out flying insects.But I lost interest, I guess, for I dropped the habit. Now I can see birds. Probably some people can look at the grass at their feet and discover all the crawling creatures. I would like to know grasses and sedges—and care. Then my least journey into the world would be a field trip, a series of happy recognitions. Thoreau, in an expansive mood, exulted, â€Å"What a rich book might be made about buds, including, perhaps, sprouts! † It would be nice to think so. I cherish mental images I have of three perfectly happy people. One collects stones.Another—an Englishman, say—watches clouds. The third lives on a coast and collects drops of seawater which 18 / Annie Dillard he examines microscopically an d mounts. But I don’t see what the specialist sees, and so I cut myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the various forms of happiness. Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-youdon’t affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.These disappearances stun me into stillness and concentration; they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven veils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal: now-you-don’t-see-it, now-you-do. For a week last September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the back of the house. One day I went out to investigate the racket; I walked up to a tree, an Osage orange, and a hundred birds flew away.They simply material ized out of the tree. I saw a tree, then a whisk of color, then a tree again. I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds took flight. Not a branch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparently weightless as well as invisible. Or, it was as if the leaves of the Osage orange had been freed from a spell in the form of red-winged blackbirds; they flew from the tree, caught my eye in the sky, and vanished. When I looked again at the tree the leaves had reassembled as if nothing had happened.Finally I walked directly to the trunk of the tree and a final hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, and vanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? The Osage orange, unruffled, looked just as it had looked from the house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirds cried from its crown. I looked downstream where they flew, and they were gone. Searching, I couldn’t spot one. I wandered downstream to force them to play their hand, but they’d crossed the c reek and scattered. One show to a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 19 customer.These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees. It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot? Specialists can find the most incredibly wellhidden things. A book I read when I was young recommended an easy way to find caterpillars to rear: you simply find some fresh caterpillar droppings, look up, and there’s your caterpillar.More recently an author advised me to set my mind at ease about those piles of cut stems on the ground in grassy fields. Field mice make them; they cut the grass down by degrees to reach the seeds at the head. It seems that when the grass is tightly packed, as in a field of ripe grain, the blade won’t topple at a single cut through the stem; instead , the cut stem simply drops vertically, held in the crush of grain. The mouse severs the bottom again and again, the stem keeps dropping an inch at a time, and finally the head is low enough for the mouse to reach the seeds.Meanwhile, the mouse is positively littering the field with its little piles of cut stems into which, presumably, the author of the book is constantly stumbling. If I can’t see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open. I’m always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I’ve not seen one. I bang on hollow trees near water, but so far no flying squirrels have appeared. In flat country I watch every sunset in hopes of seeing the green ray.The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurting fountain at the moment of sunset; it throbs into the sky for two seconds and disappears. One more reason to ke ep my eyes open. A photography professor at the University of Florida just happened to 20 / Annie Dillard see a bird die in midflight; it jerked, died, dropped, and smashed on the ground. I squint at the wind because I read Stewart Edward White: â€Å"I have always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could see the wind—the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris fleeing high in the air. White was an excellent observer, and devoted an entire chapter of The Mountains to the subject of seeing deer: â€Å"As soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificial obvious, then you too will see deer. † But the artificial obvious is hard to see. My eyes account for less than one percent of the weight of my head; I’m bony and dense; I see what I expect. I once spent a full three minutes looking at a bullfrog that was so unexpectedly large I couldn’t see it even though a dozen enthusiastic campers were shouting directions.Finally I asked, â€Å"What color am I looking for? † and a fellow said, â€Å"Green. † When at last I picked out the frog, I saw what painters are up against: the thing wasn’t green at all, but the color of wet hickory bark. The lover can see, and the knowledgeable. I visited an aunt and uncle at a quarter-horse ranch in Cody, Wyoming. I couldn’t do much of anything useful, but I could, I thought, draw. So, as we all sat around the kitchen table after supper, I produced a sheet of paper and drew a horse. â€Å"That’s one lame horse,† my aunt volunteered.The rest of the family joined in: â€Å"Only place to saddle that one is his neck†; â€Å"Looks like we better shoot the poor thing, on account of those terrible growths. † Meekly, I slid the pencil and paper down the table. Everyone in that family, including my three young cousins, could draw a horse. Beautifully. When the paper came back it looked as though five shining, real quarter horses had been corralled by mistake with a papier-mache moose; the real horses seemed to gaze at the monster with a steady, puzzled air. I stay away from horses now, but I can do a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 21 creditable goldfish.The point is that I just don’t know what the lover knows; I just can’t see the artificial obvious that those in the know construct. The herpetologist asks the native, â€Å"Are there snakes in that ravine? † â€Å"Nosir. † And the herpetologist comes home with, yessir, three bags full. Are there butterflies on that mountain? Are the bluets in bloom, are there arrowheads here, or fossil shells in the shale? Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me.A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: â€Å"This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is. † A fog that won’t burn away drifts and flows across my field of vision. When you see fog move against a backdrop of deep pines, you don’t see the fog itself, but streaks of clearness floating across the air in dark shreds.So I see only tatters of clearness through a pervading obscurity. I can’t distinguish the fog from the overcast sky; I can’t be sure if the light is direct or reflected. Everywhere darkness and the presence of the unseen appalls. We estimate now that only one atom dances alone in every cubic meter of intergalactic space. I blink and squint. What planet or power yanks Halley’s Comet out of orbit? We haven’t seen that force yet; it’s a question of distance, density, and the pallor of reflected light. We rock, cradled in the swaddling band of darkness.Even the simple darkness of night whispers suggestions to the mind. Last summer, in August, I stayed at the creek too late. 22 / Annie Dillard Where Tinker Creek flows under the sycamore log bridge to the tear-shaped island, it is slow and shallow, fringed thinly in cattail marsh. At this spot an astonishing bloom of life supports vast breeding populations of insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. On windless summer evenings I stalk along the creek bank or straddle the sycamore log in absolute stillness, watching for muskrats.The night I stayed too late I was hunched on the log staring spellbound at spreading, reflected stains of lilac on the water. A cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if turned on by a switch; its reflection just as suddenly materialized on the water upstream, flat and floating, so that I couldn’t see the creek bottom, or life in the water under the cloud. Downstream, away from the cloud on the water, water turtles smooth as beans were gliding down with the current in a series of easy, weightless push-offs, as men bound on the moon.I didn’t know whether to trace the progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking sticking my face in one of the bridge’s spiderwebs made invisible by the gathering dark, or take a chance on seeing the carp, or scan the mud bank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trailed it after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying upstream with their tails forked, so fast. But shadows spread, and deepened, and stayed. After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests.I stirred. A land turtle on the bank, startled, hissed the air from its lungs and withdrew into its shell. An uneasy pink here, an unfathomable blue th ere, gave great suggestion of lurking beings. Things were going on. I couldn’t see whether that sere rustle I heard was a distant rattlesnake, slit-eyed, or a nearby sparrow kicking in the dry flood debris slung at the foot of a willow. Tremendous action Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 23 roiled the water everywhere I looked, big action, inexplicable. A tremor welled up beside a gaping muskrat burrow in the bank and I caught my breath, but no muskrat appeared.The ripples continued to fan upstream with a steady, powerful thrust. Night was knitting over my face an eyeless mask, and I still sat transfixed. A distant airplane, a delta wing out of nightmare, made a gliding shadow on the creek’s bottom that looked like a stingray cruising upstream. At once a black fin slit the pink cloud on the water, shearing it in two. The two halves merged together and seemed to dissolve before my eyes. Darkness pooled in the cleft of the creek and rose, as water collects in a well. Untamed, dr eaming lights flickered over the sky. I saw hints of hulking underwater shadows, two pale splashes out of the water, and ound ripples rolling close together from a blackened center. At last I stared upstream where only the deepest violet remained of the cloud, a cloud so high its underbelly still glowed feeble color reflected from a hidden sky lighted in turn by a sun halfway to China. And out of that violet, a sudden enormous black body arced over the water. I saw only a cylindrical sleekness. Head and tail, if there was a head and tail, were both submerged in cloud. I saw only one ebony fling, a headlong dive to darkness; then the waters closed, and the lights went out. I walked home in a shivering daze, up hill and down.Later I lay open-mouthed in bed, my arms flung wide at my sides to steady the whirling darkness. At this latitude I’m spinning 836 miles an hour round the earth’s axis; I often fancy I feel my sweeping fall as a breakneck arc like the dive of dolphin s, and the hollow rushing of wind raises hair on my neck and the side of my face. In orbit around the sun I’m moving 64,800 miles an hour. The solar system as a whole, like a merry-go-round unhinged, spins, bobs, and blinks at the speed of 43,200 miles an hour along a course set east of Hercules. Someone has 24 / Annie Dillard iped, and we are dancing a tarantella until the sweat pours. I open my eyes and I see dark, muscled forms curl out of water, with flapping gills and flattened eyes. I close my eyes and I see stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper stars bowing to deepest stars at the crown of an infinite cone. â€Å"Still,† wrote van Gogh in a letter, â€Å"a great deal of light falls on everything. † If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terror results. Peter Freuchen describes the notorious kayak sickness to which Greenland Eskimos are prone. The Greenland fjords are p eculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away†¦. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirrorlike water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking†¦.Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls. † Some hunters are especially cursed with this panic, and bring ruin and sometimes starvation to their families. Sometimes here in Virginia at sunset low clouds on the southern or northern horizon are completely invisible in the lighted sky. I only know one is there because I can see its reflection in still water. T he first time I discovered this mystery I looked from cloud to no-cloud in bewilderment, checking my bearings over and over, thinking maybe the ark of the covenant was just passing by south of Dead Man Mountain.Only much later did I read the explanation: polarized light from the sky is very much weakened by reflection, but the light Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 25 in clouds isn’t polarized. So invisible clouds pass among visible clouds, till all slide over the mountains; so a greater light extinguishes a lesser as though it didn’t exist. In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss. They’re out there showering down, committing hara-kiri in a flame of fatal attraction, and hissing perhaps at last into the ocean.But at dawn what looks like a blue dome clamps down over me like a lid on a pot. The stars and planets could smash and I’d never know. Only a piece of ashen moon occasionally climbs up or down the insi de of the dome, and our local star without surcease explodes on our heads. We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever.Darkness appalls and light dazzles; the scrap of visible light that doesn’t hurt my eyes hurts my brain. What I see sets me swaying. Size and distance and the sudden swelling of meanings confuse me, bowl me over. I straddle the sycamore log bridge over Tinker Creek in the summer. I look at the lighted creek bottom: snail tracks tunnel the mud in quavering curves. A crayfish jerks, but by the time I absorb what has happened, he’s gone in a billowing smokescreen of silt. I look at the water: minnows and shiners. If I’m thinking minnows, a carp will fill my brain till I scream.I look at the water’ s surface: skaters, bubbles, and leaves sliding down. Suddenly, my own face, reflected, startles me witless. Those snails have been tracking my face! Finally, with a shuddering wrench of the will, I see clouds, cirrus clouds. I’m dizzy, I fall in. This looking business is risky. Once I stood on a humped rock on nearby Purgatory Mountain, watching through binoculars the great autumn 26 / Annie Dillard hawk migration below, until I discovered that I was in danger of joining the hawks on a vertical migration of my own.I was used to binoculars, but not, apparently, to balancing on humped rocks while looking through them. I staggered. Everything advanced and receded by turns; the world was full of unexplained foreshortenings and depths. A distant huge tan object, a hawk the size of an elephant, turned out to be the browned bough of a nearby loblolly pine. I followed a sharp-shinned hawk against a featureless sky, rotating my head unawares as it flew, and when I lowered the glass a glimpse of my own looming shoulder sent me staggering. What prevents the men on Palomar from falling, voiceless and blinded, from their tiny, vaulted chairs?I reel in confusion; I don’t understand what I see. With the naked eye I can see two million light-years to the Andromeda galaxy. Often I slop some creek water in a jar and when I get home I dump it in a white china bowl. After the silt settles I return and see tracings of minute snails on the bottom, a planarian or two winding round the rim of water, roundworms shimmying frantically, and finally, when my eyes have adjusted to these dimensions, amoebae. At first the amoebae look like muscae volitantes, those curled moving spots you seem to see in your eyes when you stare at a distant wall.Then I see the amoebae as drops of water congealed, bluish, translucent, like chips of sky in the bowl. At length I choose one individual and give myself over to its idea of an evening. I see it dribble a grainy foot before it on its we t, unfathomable way. Do its unedited sense impressions include the fierce focus of my eyes? Shall I take it outside and show it Andromeda, and blow its little endoplasm? I stir the water with a finger, in case it’s running out of oxygen. Maybe I should get a tropical aquarium with motorized bubblers and lights, and keep this one for aPilgrim at Tinker Creek / 27 pet. Yes, it would tell its fissioned descendants, the universe is two feet by five, and if you listen closely you can hear the buzzing music of the spheres. Oh, it’s mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. It’s one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I can’t see. Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small. No culture explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are not seeing something.Galileo thought comets were an optical il lusion. This is fertile ground: since we are certain that they’re not, we can look at what our scientists have been saying with fresh hope. What if there are really gleaming, castellated cities hung upsidedown over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans always passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger. I turn from the window. I’m blind as a bat, sensing only from every direction the echo of my own thin cries.I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. When Western surgeons discovered how to perform safe cataract operations, they ranged across Europe and America operating on dozens of men and women of all ages who had been blinded by cataracts since birth. Von Senden collected accounts of such cases; the histories are fascinating. Many doctors had tested their patients’ sense perceptions and ideas of spa ce both before and after the operations. The vast majority of patients, of both sexes and all ages, had, in von Senden’s opinion, no idea of space whatsoever.Form, distance, and size were so many meaningless syllables. A patient â€Å"had no idea of depth, confusing it with roundness. † Before 28 / Annie Dillard the operation a doctor would give a blind patient a cube and a sphere; the patient would tongue it or feel it with his hands, and name it correctly. After the operation the doctor would show the same objects to the patient without letting him touch them; now he had no clue whatsoever what he was seeing. One patient called lemonade â€Å"square† because it pricked on his tongue as a square shape pricked on the touch of his hands.Of another postoperative patient, the doctor writes, â€Å"I have found in her no notion of size, for example, not even within the narrow limits which she might have encompassed with the aid of touch. Thus when I asked her to sho w me how big her mother was, she did not stretch out her hands, but set her two index-fingers a few inches apart. † Other doctors reported their patients' own statements to similar effect. â€Å"The room he was in†¦he knew to be but part of the house, yet he could not conceive that the whole house could look bigger† â€Å"Those who are blind from birth†¦have no real conception of height or distance.A house that is a mile away is thought of as nearby, but requiring the taking of a lot of steps†¦. The elevator that whizzes him up and down gives no more sense of vertical distance than does the train of horizontal. † For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning: â€Å"The girl went through the experience that we all go through and forget, the moment we are born. She saw, but it did not mean anything but a lot of different kinds of brightness. † Again, â€Å"I asked the patient what he could see; he answered that he sa w an extensive field of light, in which everything appeared dull, confused, and in motion.He could not distinguish objects. † Another patient saw â€Å"nothing but a confusion of forms and colors. † When a newly sighted girl saw photographs and paintings, she asked, â€Å"‘Why do they put those dark marks all over them? ’ ‘Those aren’t dark marks,’ her mother explained, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 29 ‘those are shadows. That is one of the ways the eye knows that things have shape. If it were not for shadows many things would look flat. ’ ‘Well, that’s how things do look,’ Joan answered. ‘Everything looks flat with dark patches. ’† But it is the patients’ concepts of space that are most revealing.One patient, according to his doctor, â€Å"practiced his vision in a strange fashion; thus he takes off one of his boots, throws it some way off in front of him, and then attempts to gau ge the distance at which it lies; he takes a few steps towards the boot and tries to grasp it; on failing to reach it, he moves on a step or two and gropes for the boot until he finally gets hold of it. † â€Å"But even at this stage, after three weeks’ experience of seeing,† von Senden goes on, â€Å"‘space,’ as he conceives it, ends with visual space, i. e. with color-patches that happen to bound his view.He does not yet have the notion that a larger object (a chair) can mask a smaller one (a dog), or that the latter can still be present even though it is not directly seen. † In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of colorpatches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult. Soon after his operation a patient â€Å"generally bumps into one of these color-patches and observes them to be substantial, since they resist him as tactual objects do.In walking about it also strikes him—or can if he pays attention—that he is continually passing in between the colors he sees, that he can go past a visual object, that a part of it then steadily disappears from view; and that in spite of this, however he twists and turns—whether entering the room from the door, for example, or returning back to it—he always has a visual space in front of him. Thus he gradually comes to realize that there is also a space behind him, which he does not see. † The mental effort involved in these reasonings proves over- 0 / Annie Dillard whelming for many patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable. It oppresses them to realize that they have been visible to people all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge or consent. A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair. â€Å"The child can see, but will not make use of his sight.Only when pressed can he with difficulty be brought to look at objects in his neighborhood; but more than a foot away it is impossible to bestir him to the necessary effort. † Of a twenty-one-year-old girl, the doctor relates, â€Å"Her unfortunate father, who had hoped for so much from this operation, wrote that his daughter carefully shuts her eyes whenever she wishes to go about the house, especially when she comes to a staircase, and that she is never happier or more at ease than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness. A fifteen-year-old boy, who was also in love with a girl at the asylum for the blind, finally blurted out, â€Å"No, really, I can’t stand it anymore; I want to be sent back to the asylum again. If things aren’t altered, I’ll tear my eye s out. † Some do learn to see, especially the young ones. But it changes their lives. One doctor comments on â€Å"the rapid and complete loss of that striking and wonderful serenity which is characteristic only of those who have never yet seen. † A blind man who learns to see is ashamed of his old habits. He dresses up, grooms himself, and tries to make a good impression.While he was blind he was indifferent to objects unless they were edible; now, â€Å"a sifting of values sets in†¦his thoughts and wishes are mightily stirred and some few of the patients are thereby led into dissimulation, envy, theft and fraud. † On the other hand, many newly sighted people speak well of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 31 the world, and teach us how dull is our own vision. To one patient, a human hand, unrecognized, is â€Å"something bright and then holes. † Shown a bunch of grapes, a boy calls out, â€Å"It is dark, blue and shiny†¦. It isn’t smooth, it ha s bumps and hollows. A little girl visits a garden. â€Å"She is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer, stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names on taking hold of it, and then as ‘the tree with the lights in it. ’† Some delight in their sight and give themselves over to the visual world. Of a patient just after her bandages were removed, her doctor writes, â€Å"The first things to attract her attention were her own hands; she looked at them very closely, moved them repeatedly to and fro, bent and stretched the fingers, and seemed greatly astonished at the sight. One girl was eager to tell her blind friend that â€Å"men do not really look like trees at all,† and astounded to discover that her every visitor had an utterly different face. Finally, a twenty-two-old girl was dazzled by the world’s brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did n ot recognize any objects, but, â€Å"the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God!How beautiful! ’† I saw color-patches for weeks after I read this wonderful book. It was summer; the peaches were ripe in the valley orchards. When I woke in the morning, color-patches wrapped round my eyes, intricately, leaving not one unfilled spot. All day long I walked among shifting color-patches that parted before me like the Red Sea and closed again in silence, transfigured, wherever I looked back. Some patches swelled and loomed, while others vanished utterly, and dark marks flitted at random 32 / Annie Dillard over the whole dazzling sweep.But I couldn’t sustain the illusion of flatness. I’ve been around for too long. Form is condemned to an eternal danse macabre with meaning: I couldn’t unpeach the pe aches. Nor can I remember ever having seen without understanding; the color-patches of infancy are lost. My brain then must have been smooth as any balloon. I’m told I reached for the moon; many babies do. But the color-patches of infancy swelled as meaning filled them; they arrayed themselves in solemn ranks down distance which unrolled and stretched before me like a plain. The moon rocketed away.I live now in a world of shadows that shape and distance color, a world where space makes a kind of terrible sense. What gnosticism is this, and what physics? The fluttering patch I saw in my nursery window—silver and green and shape-shifting blue—is gone; a row of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the distant lawn. That humming oblong creature pale as light that stole along the walls of my room at night, stretching exhilaratingly around the corners, is gone, too, gone the night I ate of the bittersweet fruit, put two and two together and puckered forever my brain.Martin Buber tells this tale: â€Å"Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi Elimelekh that evenings he saw the angel who rolls away the light before the darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light. ‘Yes,’ said Rabbi Elimelekh, ‘in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don’t see these things anymore. †Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ Why didn’t someone hand those newly sighted people paints and brushes from the start, when they still didn’t know what anything was? Then maybe we all could see color-patches too, the world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam gave names.The scales would drop from my eyes; I’d see trees like men walking; I’d run down the road against all orders, hallooing and leaping. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 33 Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it. It is, as Ruskin says, â₠¬Å"not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen. † My eyes alone can’t solve analogy tests using figures, the ones which show, with increasing elaborations, a big square, then a small square in a big square, then a big triangle, and expect me to find a small triangle in a big triangle.I have to say the words, describe what I’m seeing. If Tinker Mountain erupted, I’d be likely to notice. But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present. It’s not that I’m observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio. When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head. Some ays when a mist covers the mountains, when the muskrats won’t show and the microscope’s mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall. But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter.When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer. 34 / Annie Dillard It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the mud dy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and flash! the sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn’t watch for it.It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over a dun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creek’s surface, very slow and steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time.Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fou ntain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone. When I see this way I see truly. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses. I am the man who watches the baseball game in silence in an empty stadium. I see the game purely; I’m abstracted and dazed. When it’s all over and the white-suited players lope off the green field to their shadowed dugouts, I leap to my feet; I cheer and cheer. But I can’t go out and try to see this way.I’ll fail, I’ll go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 35 discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod. The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover un iversally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness.Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. â€Å"Launch into the deep,† says Jacques Ellul, â€Å"and you shall see. † The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all.