Seeing is the second chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the Pulitzer Prize for non fiction in 1975. It is a story starting with memories from her childhood and shifting toward her life living by Tinker Creek in Roanoke Valley, Virginia. It is about observation and how little you actually observe things as you grow older. She uses nature and its beauty as a metaphor for the beauty in life. She tries through out the story to grasp the beauty in the world. She uses people that have been cured from cataracts who are seeing for the first time as an example. They can see everything in its simplest form, in color patches as she describes it. She decides that if you were to really try to see everything in its purist form like this a normal person would go mad.
This reading is not for a lot of people. It is extremely metaphorical and I think if it were written less poetically it would be more for me and for many others. I like some of the points that the story makes. It makes you think of what we take for granted in life. One of my favorite quotes from the text is "If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, sense the world is in face planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days." I don't know if everyone thinks like me but this line makes me want to spend a year in the mountains and quit my job.
There were many very interesting parts to this reading and she is credible to talk about whatever it is she may be trying to explain here because she won the Pulitzer prize but like I said this article is not for everyone. I felt like she was describing a really crazy acid trip through the first half of the story, and at the time that it was written I wouldn't be suprized. I feel like I am bashing an reading that I shouldn't be messing with because it won the Pulitzer but its just not my style of writing. Ive never really like entirely poetic writing styles. I like a metaphor as much as the next guy but not an entire story full of them.
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2 comments:
Although I didn't get a chance to read the who 'Seeing' essay, you have made it evident that the author is writing in a poetical sense of nature. It seems as though you are writing to an audience who has not yet read the essay (like myself), but at the same time, a person who has read the essay would be able to commonly relate to the subject matter contained in your review. You have taken an almost one-sided approach by stating that the article is not for everyone, but it is in your best interest to state your own opinion about the article, which will ultimately bring about different posts and different views of the essay.
I do agree that this article is defiantly not for everyone. I feel like the audience that she is writing to isn’t necessarily one that is determined by age, education, or even field of study, I think it runs more along the lines of what genre of writing someone can connect with the most. Even though I wasn’t particularly fond of the article I do feel that Dillard did a great job of appealing to the audience. I found my self several times wondering off of the text back to when I was a little kid running around creating some sort of mischief. In particular I remember how I would crawl around on the ground outside to look at the grass, find money and just look to see what I could find, but I still even to this day have a vivid image of what the grass and dirt looked like up close. I really do think that was the point of this article was to get the reader to realize what is taken for granted by appealing to their emotions in this way.
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