Like Roethke, 'I take my waking slow'

Dr. Sexson told me to read 'Total Eclipse' because something would jump out at me, specifically for me. Earlier this semester, I blogged about a poem by Theodore Roethke called 'The Waking' and the experiences I have had since discovering the poem. Annie Dillard references the poem and Roethke in 'Total Eclipse', saying 'Like Roethke, I take my waking slow'. I think I may have fallen in love with Annie Dillard, and she plays with the idea of 'The Waking' throughout the entire piece. I am happy to see that someone else was touched by that particular Roethke poem and even more thrilled that Dillard mentions it in her work. As Sexson would say, 'This is good stuff, IS IT NOT?' :)

Roethke says, 'I wake to sleep and take my waking slow'. Dillard talks about this act of moving through life in a specific pattern, habitually and wholly unaware of what is actually going on around us. We have talked a lot in this class about the idea of time and experience and the importance of experience in the span of human life. Is experience useless, because, as Helena mentioned in her blog, we never really learn how to fully incorporate these experiences into our lives? I think Dillard is trying to say that each day we begin again, waking slow to our own actuality, but never really being able to understand. Dillard says 'we live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall'. We are constantly told and taught to 'wake up!' and 'pay attention!', but what exactly are we paying attention to? Why is it important to pay attention when most of our experience is lost or forgotten? In death, experience ceases to matter. Dr. Sexson said once that we should all be optimally receptive to everything in the world, but are we capable of doing that? No matter how traumatic, wonderful, frightening, or memorable an experience, does it REALLY matter?

At the end of the piece, Dillard says 'From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounch back and hurry for the latitudes of home'. It's as if Dillard is saying we are constantly teetering on the edge of 'knowing' and 'seeing' in a different way than we are accustomed and just when we have a 'sudden manifestation of something divine', we retreat. We always retreat. To Dillard, it 'is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg'. This is what human beings do. We so quickly replace one experience with a different experience, and what are we left with? Am I making any sense? Maybe not...