The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

by Annie Dillard

  Recently I returned to that Congregational church for an ecumenical service. A Catholic priest, together with the resident minister, served a communion of grape juice. Both the priest and the minister were professionals, old hands. They bungled with dignity and aplomb, both at ease and awed, half confident and controlled and half bewildered: “Where is it?,” I could hear them whispering; “Haven’t you got it?”; “I thought you had it!”

  The priest, new to me, was in his sixties. He was tall; he wore his weariness loosely, standing upright and controlling his breath. When he knelt at the altar, and when he rose from kneeling, his knees cracked. It was a fine church music, this sound of his cracking knees.

  THE LAND

  Polar explorers—one gathers from their accounts—sought at the Poles something of the sublime. Simplicity and purity attracted them. They set out to perform clear tasks in uncontaminated lands. The land’s austerity held them. They praised the land’s spare beauty as if it were a moral or spiritual quality: “icy halls of cold sublimity,” “lofty peaks perfectly covered with eternal snow.” Fridtjof Nansen referred to “the great adventure of the ice, deep and pure as infinity . . . the eternal round of the universe and its eternal death.” Everywhere polar prose evokes these absolutes, these ideas of “eternity” and “perfection,” as if they were perfectly visible parts of the landscape.

  They went, I say, partly in search of the sublime, and they found it the only way it can be found, here or there—around the edges, tucked into the corners of the days. For they were people—all of them, even the British—and, despite the purity of their conceptions, they man-hauled their humanity to the Poles along with them.

  They man-hauled their frail flesh to the Poles, and encountered conditions so difficult that, for instance, it commonly took members of Scott’s South Polar party several hours each morning to put on their boots. Day and night they did miserable, niggling, and often fatal battle with frostbitten toes, diarrhea, bleeding gums, hunger, weakness, mental confusion, and despair.

  They man-hauled their sweet human absurdity to the Poles. When Robert E. Peary and Matthew Henson reached the North Pole in 1909, Peary planted there in the frozen ocean, according to L. P. Kirwan, the flag of the Dekes: “the colours of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity at Bowdoin College, of which Peary was an alumnus.”

  Polar explorers must adapt to conditions. They must adapt, on the one hand, to severe physical limitations; they must adapt, on the other hand—like the rest of us—to ordinary emotional limitations. The hard part is in finding a workable compromise. If you are Peary and have planned your every move down to the last jot and tittle, you can perhaps get away with carrying a Deke flag to the North Pole, if it will make you feel good. After eighteen years’ preparation, why not feel a little good? If, on the other hand, you are an officer with the Franklin expedition and do not know what you are doing or where you are, but think you cannot eat food except from sterling silver tableware, you cannot get away with it. Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand—that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

  They made allowances for their emotional needs. Over-wintering expedition ships carried, in addition to sufficient fuel, equipment for the publication of weekly newspapers. The brave polar men sat cooling their heels in the middle of nowhere, reading in cold type their own and their bunkmates’ gossip, in such weeklies as Parry’s Winter Chronicle and North Georgia Gazette, Nansen’s Framsjaa, or Scott’s South Polar Times and The Blizzard. Polar explorers amused themselves as well with theatrical productions. If one had been frozen into the pack ice off Ross Island, near Antarctica, aboard Scott’s ship Discover, one midwinter night in 1902, one could have seen the only performance of Ticket of Leave, “a screaming comedy in one act.” Similarly, if, in the dead of winter, 1819, one had been a member of young William Edward Parry’s expedition frozen into the pack ice in the high Arctic, one could have caught the first of a series of fortnightly plays, an uproarious success called Miss in Her Teens. According to Kirwan, “‘This,’ Parry dryly remarked, ‘afforded to the men such a fund of amusement as fully to justify the expectations we had formed of the utility of theatrical entertainments.’” And you yourself, Royal Navy Commander William Edward Parry, were you not yourself the least bit amused? Or, at the distinguished age of twenty-nine years old, did you stand on your dignity?

  God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God that demands these things.

  Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates. You do not have to do these things, not at all. God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot. So, no, you do not have to do these things—unless, that is, you want to know God. For they work on you, not on him.

  You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars themselves neither require nor demand it.

  THE TECHNOLOGY

  It is a matter for computation: How far can one walk carrying how much silver? The computer balks at the problem—too many unknowns—and puts instead its own questions: Who is this “one”? What degree of stamina may we calculate for? Under what conditions does this one propose to walk, at what latitudes? With how many companions, how much aid?

  THE PEOPLE

  The Mass has been building to this point, to the solemn delivery of those few hushed phrases known as the Sanctus. We have confessed, in a low, distinct murmur, our sins; we have become the people broken, and then the people made whole by our reluctant assent to the priest’s proclamation of God’s mercy. Now, as usual, we will, in the stillest voice, stunned, repeat the Sanctus, repeat why it is that we have come:

  Holy, holy, holy Lord,

  God of power and might,

  heaven and earth are full of your glory . . .

  It is here, if ever, that one loses oneself at sea. Here, one’s eyes roll up, and the sun rolls overhead, and the floe rolls underfoot, and the scene of unrelieved ice and sea rolls over the planet’s pole and over the world’s rim, wide and unseen.

  Now, just as we are dissolved in our privacy and about to utter the words of the Sanctus, the lead singer of Wildflowers bursts onstage from the wings. I raise my head. He is taking enormous, enthusiastic strides, pumping his guitar’s neck up and down. Drooping after him come the orange-haired country-and-western-style woman; the soprano, who, as if to shorten herself, carries her neck forward like a horse; the withdrawn boy; and then the Chinese man, holding a tambourine as if it had stuck by some defect to his fingers and he has resolved to forget about it. These array themselves in a clump downstage right. The priest is nowhere in sight.

  Alas, alack, oh brother, we are going to have to sing the Sanctus.

  There is, of course, nothing new about singing the Sanctus. The lead singer smiles disarmingly. He hits a chord with the flat of his hand. There is a new arrangement. The Chinese man with sudden vigor bangs the tambourine and looks at his hands, startled. They run us through the Sanctus three or four times. The words are altered a bit to fit the strong upbeat rhythm:

  Heaven and earth

  (Heaven and earth earth earth earth)

  Are full (full full full)

  Of your glory . . .

  Must I join this song? May I keep only my silver? My backgammon board, I agree, is a frivolity. I relinquish it. I will leave it right here on the ice. But my silver? My family crest? One knife, one fork, one spoon, to carry beneath the glance of heaven and back? I have lugged it around for years; I am, I say, superlatively strong. Don’t laugh. I am superlatively strong! Don’t laugh; you’ll make me laugh. The answer is no. We are singing the Sanctus, it seems, and they are passin
g the plate. I would rather, I think, undergo the famous dark night of the soul than encounter in church the dread hootenanny—but these purely personal preferences are of no account, and maladaptive to boot. They are passing the plate and I toss in my schooling; I toss in my rank in the Royal Navy, my erroneous and incomplete charts, my pious refusal to eat sled dogs, my watch, my keys, and my shoes. I was looking for bigger game, not little moral lessons—but who can argue with conditions?

  “Heaven and earth earth earth earth,” we sing. The withdrawn boy turns his head toward a man in front of me, who must be his father. Unaccountably, the enormous teenaged soprano catches my eye, exultant. A low shudder of shock crosses our floe. We have split from the pack; we have crossed the Arctic Circle, and the current has us.

  THE LAND

  We are clumped on an ice floe, drifting in the black polar sea. Heaven and earth are full of our terrible singing. Overhead we see a blurred, colorless brightness; at our feet we see the dulled, swift ice and recrystallized snow. The sea is black and green; a hundred thousand floes and bergs float in the water and spin and scatter in the current around us everywhere as far as we can see. The wind is cool, moist, and scented with salt.

  I am wearing, I discover, the uniform of a Keystone Kop. I examine my hat: a black cardboard constable’s hat with a white felt star stapled to the band above the brim. My dark Keystone Kop jacket is nicely belted, and there is a tin badge on my chest. A holster around my hips carries a popgun with a cork on a string, and a red roll of caps. My feet are bare, but I feel no cold. I am skating around on the ice, and singing, and bumping into people who, because the ice is slippery, bump into other people. “Excuse me!” I keep saying, “I beg your pardon—whoops there!”

  When a crack develops in our floe and opens at my feet, I jump across it—skillfully, I think—but my jump pushes my side of the floe away, and I wind up leaping full tilt into the water. The Chinese man extends a hand to pull me out, but alas, he slips and I drag him in. We are treading water, he and I, singing, and collecting a bit of a crowd. It takes a troupe of circus clowns to get us both out. I check my uniform at once and learn that my rather flattering hat is intact, my trousers virtually unwrinkled, but my roll of caps is wet. The Chinese man is fine; we thank the clowns.

  This troupe of circus clowns, I hear, is poorly paid. They are invested in bright, loose garments; a bunch of spontaneous, unskilled, oversized children, they joke and bump into people. At one end of the floe, ten of them—red, yellow, and blue—are trying to climb upon one another to make a human pyramid. It is a wonderfully funny sight, because they have put the four smallest clowns on the bottom, and the biggest, fattest clown is trying to climb to the top. The rest of the clowns are doing gymnastics; they tumble on the ice and flip cheerfully in midair. Their crucifixes fly from their ruffled necks as they flip, and hit them on their bald heads as they land. Our floe is smaller now, and we seem to have drifted into a faster bit of current. Repeatedly we ram little icebergs that rock as we hit them. Some of them tilt clear over like punching bags; they bounce back with great splashes, and water streams down their blue sides as they rise. The country-and-western-style woman is fending off some of the larger bergs with a broom. The lugs with the mustaches have found, or brought, a Frisbee, and a game is developing down the middle of our floe. Near the Frisbee game, a bunch of people including myself and some clowns are running. We fling ourselves down on the ice, shoulders first, and skid long distances like pucks.

  Now the music ceases and we take our seats in the pews. A baby is going to be baptized. Overhead the sky is brightening; I do not know if this means we have drifted farther north, or all night.

  THE PEOPLE

  The baby’s name is Oswaldo; he is a very thin baby who looks to be about one. He never utters a peep; he looks grim, stiff as a planked shad. His parents—his father carrying him—and his godparents, the priest, and the two acolytes, are standing on the ice between the first row of pews and the linoleum-floored sacristy. I am resting my bare feet on the velvet prie-dieu—to keep those feet from playing on the ice during the ceremony.

  Oswaldo is half-Filipino. His mother is Filipina. She has a wide mouth with much lipstick, and wide eyes; she wears a tight black skirt and stiletto heels. The father looks like Ozzie Nelson. He has marcelled yellow hair, a bland, meek face, and a big, meek nose. He is wearing a brown leather flight jacket. The godparents are both Filipinos, one of whom, in a pastel denim jumpsuit, keeps mugging for the camera another family member is shooting from the aisle.

  The baby has a little red scar below one eye. He is wearing a long white lace baptismal gown, blue tennis shoes with white rubber toes, and red socks. The priest anoints the baby’s head with oil. He addresses to the parents several articles of faith: “Do you believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of Heaven and earth?”

  “Yes, we believe.”

  The priest repeats a gesture he says was Christ’s, explaining that it symbolically opens the infant’s five senses to the knowledge of God. Uttering a formal prayer, he lays his hand loosely over Oswaldo’s face and touches in rapid succession his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. The baby blinks. The priest, whose voice is sometimes lost in the ruff at his neck, is formal and gentle in his bearing; he knows the kid is cute, but he is not going to sentimentalize the sacrament.

  Since our floe spins, we in the pews see the broken floes and tilting bergs, the clogged, calm polar sea, and the variously lighted sky and water’s rim shift and revolve enormously behind the group standing around the baby. Once I see a yellowish polar bear erupt out of the water as smoothly as if climbing were falling. I see the bear splash and flow into a distant floeberg that tilts out of sight.

  Now the acolytes bring a pitcher, a basin, and a linen towel. The father tilts the rigid baby over the basin; the priest pours water from the pitcher over the baby’s scalp; the mother sops the baby with the linen towel and wraps it over his head, so that he looks, proudly, as though he has just been made a swami.

  To conclude, the priest brings out a candle, for the purpose, I think, of pledging everybody to Christian fellowship with Oswaldo. Actually, I do not know what it is for; I am not listening. I am watching the hands at the candlestick. Each of the principals wraps a hand around the brass candlestick: the two acolytes with their small, pale hands at its base; the two families—Oswaldo’s and his godparents’—with their varicolored hands in a row, and the priest at the top, as though he has just won the bat toss at baseball. The baby rides high in his father’s arms, pointing his heels in his tennis shoes, silent, wanting down. His father holds him firmly with one hand and holds the candlestick beside his wife’s hand with the other. The priest and the seated members of Wildflowers start clapping then—a round of applause for everybody here on the ice!—so we clap.

  II

  MONTHS HAVE PASSED; years have passed. Whatever ground gained has slipped away. New obstacles arise, and faintness of heart, and dread.

  THE LAND

  Polar explorers commonly die of hypothermia, starvation, scurvy, or dysentery; less commonly they contract typhoid fever (as Stefasson did), vitamin A poisoning from polar bear liver, or carbon monoxide poisoning from incomplete combustion inside tents sealed with snow. Very commonly, as a prelude to these deaths, polar explorers lose the use of their feet; their frozen toes detach when they remove their socks.

  Particularly vivid was the death of a certain Mr. Joseph Green, the astronomer on Sir James Cook’s first voyage to high latitudes. He took sick aboard ship. One night “in a fit of the phrensy,” as a contemporary newspaper reported, he rose from his bunk and “put his legs out of the portholes, which was the occasion of his death.” Vitus Bering, shipwrecked in 1740 on Bering Island, was found years later preserved in snow. An autopsy showed he had many lice, as well as scurvy, and died of a “rectal fistula which forced gas gangrene into his tissues.”

  The bodies of various members of the Sir John Franklin expedition of 1845 were found over the course
of twenty years, by thirty search expeditions, in assorted bizarre postures scattered over the ice of Victoria Strait, Beechey Island, and King William Island.

  Sir Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, only to discover a flag that Roald Amundsen had planted there a month earlier. Scott’s body, and the bodies of two of his companions, turned up on the Ross Ice Shelf eleven miles south of one of their own supply depots. The bodies were in sleeping bags. Scott’s journals and farewell letters, found under his body, indicate that the other two had died first. His torso was well out of his sleeping bag, and, to get the dying over with, he had opened wide the collar of his parka, exposing his skin.

  Of the United States Greely expedition to the North Pole, all men died but six. Greely himself, one of the six survivors, was found “on his hands and knees with long hair in pigtails.” Of the United States De Long expedition to the North Pole in the Jeannette, all men died but two. Of the Jeannette herself and her equipment, nothing was found until three years after she sank, when, on a beach on the other side of the polar basin, a Greenlander discovered a pair of yellow oilskin breeches stamped JEANNETTE.

  Never found were the bodies of Henry Hudson, his young son, and four men, whom mutineers in 1610 had lowered from their ship in a dinghy, in Hudson’s Bay, without food or equipment. Never found were the bodies of Sir John Franklin, or of Amundsen and seventeen other men who set out for the Arctic in search of a disastrous Italian expedition, or the bodies of Scott’s men Evans and Oates. Never found were most of the drowned crew of the United States ship Polaris or the body of her commander, who died sledging on the ice.

  THE PEOPLE

  Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? The tourists are having coffee and doughnuts on Deck C. Presumably someone is minding the ship, correcting the course, avoiding icebergs and shoals, fueling the engines, watching the radar screen, noting weather reports radioed in from shore. No one would dream of asking the tourists to do these things. Alas, among the tourists on Deck C, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, we find the captain, all the ship’s officers, and all the ship’s crew. The officers chat; they swear; they wink a bit at slightly raw jokes, just like regular people. The crew members have funny accents. The wind seems to be picking up.