Heaven and Earth in Jest
- Annie Dillard doesn't just wake up, she wakes up poetically.
- She remembers how she used to have a tomcat who would jump through the window and claw her chest in the middle of the night.
- It's January now, but she remembers what it was like to wake up in the summer covered in bloody paw prints. (We're thinking she's a deep sleeper.)
- She doesn't have the cat anymore, but she still wakes expectantly. She lives beside a creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains (it's called—wait for it—Tinker Creek), and she wakes up every day "hoping to see a new thing."
- And by thing, she means element of nature; Dillard's all about the ducks and frogs and trees.
- These are the names of the mountains nearby: Tinker, Brushy, McAfee's Knob, and Dead Man. She loves the mountains because they're "restful" and "absorbent," so while she loves Tinker Creek, she considers the mountains her home.
- Tinker Creek makes a loop around her house. When she goes walking, as she does every morning, she goes north.
- Today she sits on a downed sycamore over the creek and watches the black steers from the pasture on the other side.
- The steers are bred for meat; to her, they look like walking slabs of beef.
- She goes under a barbed-wire fence and crosses a field to a little island in the middle of Tinker Creek. She loves sitting on the grass at the edge of the island; it's her special place.
- She tells us that she was sitting there two summers ago and saw a frog eaten by a giant water bug.
- Super mega grossness alert: Water bugs shoot venom into frogs, liquefy their guts, suck out the liquid, and deflate the frog. Annie watched it happen.
- Religious pontification time: In the Koran, Allah asks if we believe he created the world in jest. She considers a god who made the world, then turned his back on it.
- Maybe, she thinks, God hasn't gone away; it's just that God spreads as our understanding of the universe spreads. She wonders, however, if our consciousness has evolved to that point.
- Unless we are all deluded, she says, there seems to be such a thing as gratuitous beauty and grace.
- Annie goes to the island in the late afternoon, when the creek is up. She watches the sunset and thinks about how life is like a carnival that disappears as quickly as it arrived.
- She states the purpose of the book: It is, in Thoreau's words, her "meteorological journal of the mind."
- She's going to explore the creek for a year and tell us about it, so grab some snacks and get ready for lots of stories about nature.