All stories share in one another and
this one more so than most. The author, Annie Dillard, sees the story
of life right up "on the nose" one might say. She sees
things most of us never think about or read about, nor would we ever
imagine seeing them.
She speaks of “the mantis's abdomen dribbling out eggs in wet bubbles like tapioca pudding glued to a thorn.” See, I told you. No one sees this stuff. She tells of termites licking eggs to keep them from molding, of various insects producing countless eggs and eating them almost as fast as produced.
In her observation she tells us things beyond imagination. The microscopic root hairs of a rye plant within a single cubic inch of soil measure 6,000 miles.
Six thousand miles.
A lone aphid, breeding for a year could produce so many .10-inch long offspring they would stretch for 25 million light years.
One lightyear is 6 trillion miles.
We can be sure she didn't observe these infinite aphids, but her vast knowledge of such vast things relied on the work of scholars like Edwin Way Teale and his book, The Strange Lives of Familiar Insects. This book, says Annie, “I couldn't live without.”
The chapter for all of this Annie calls “Fecundity.” This word was new to me but I gathered its meaning soon enough, something like this: life and the making of it, the good, the bad, the ugly, the mind-boggling abundance. This fecundity, for example, means those who provide goldfish for the retail market, “Produce, measure, and sell our product by the ton.”
Tons of gold fish in everyday business? A cubic inch of root hairs measuring 6,000 miles? Aphids stretching a distance our mind can't imagine? Fecundity.
But Annie asks the questions observation brings forth. Why all this life in immediate proximity to death? Is my life worth more than the trillion aphids or barnacles or root hairs? How could breeding be such a mix of “utter spirituality and utter degradation?” And why does evolution breed death at colossal scale?
The finesse of her answers is brilliant, not least for the fact she doesn't belabor them. Annie asks if individual human life matters more, hints “yes,” and gives clue to the conundrum of death like this: “If you want to live you have to die.” Life is worth it, fecundity seems to say, in ways beyond comprehension. But death is ever there and we best make peace with that.
If you know the book you know the truth: just read it for yourself and find more, far more, than this review reveals. But if you read it you will know there is an unspoken answer in all of it, without evangelistic zeal. Such zeal would be redundant.
All stories share common ground and this could never be more true than when writing a story about the 'ground' as Annie has done. It is the ground of life and the ground of death. Grounding if you will. And I couldn't help see the story of Job, that timeless true drama in the Old Testament.
Citing Job here is no religious overlay. Job is a font of deepest wisdom, and Annie's story participates in it. It is the story of abundant life and abundant death, in Job's case real live people of his own loins. They all died at the hands of “nature and nature's God” and one wonders how on earth fecundity can be wedded to death and dearth and sorrow and loss.
Annie's answer was much like Job's. “That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation.” We could conceive it differently, but our “plan would never get off the drawing board.” She knows “this is the way the world is. And rage and shock at the pain and death...is the old, old mystery, as old as man, and completely unanswerable.”
Unanswerable. That was Job's conclusion in the face of God and while Annie says it far better than I convey, she lands in the same place. Life is marked by conundrum, and much of our natural emotions boil down to mere squeamishness. Returning to the Creek helps restore sanity and lets us know there must be something beyond that makes sense of it all. And if not, what were we going to do about it anyway?
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