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Living Like Weasels
Annie Dillard
A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.
And once, says Earnest Thompson Seton – once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?
I have been reading about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance.
Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and across the highway, is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of shallowness, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk. Hollins Pond is also called Murray’s Pond; it covers two acres of bottomland near Tinker Creek with six inches of water and six thousand lily pads. In winter, brown-and white steers stand in the middle of it, merely dampening their hooves; from the distant shore they look like miracle itself, complete with miracle’s nonchalance. Now, in summer, the steers are gone. The water lilies have blossomed and spread to a green horizontal plane that is terra firma to plodding blackbirds, and tremulous ceiling to black leeches, crayfish, and carp.
This is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none is visible here. There’s a 55 mph highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other. Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods, fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks—in whose bare clay wild turtles lay eggs.
So. I had crossed the highway, stepped over two low bar barbed-wire fences, and traced the motorcycle path in all gratitude through the wild rose and poison ivy of the pond’s shoreline up into high grassy fields. Then I cut down through the woods to the mossy fallen tree where I sit. This tree is excellent. It makes a dry, upholstered bench at the upper, marshy end of the pond, a plush jetty raised from the thorny shore between a shallow blue body of water and a deep blue body of sky. The sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, ensconced in the lap of lichen, watching the lily pads at my feet tremble and part dreamily over the thrusting path of a carp. A yellow bird appeared to my right and flew behind me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around—and the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.
Weasel! I’d never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as lizard’s; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin, maybe two brown hairs’ worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn’t see, any more than you see a window.
The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.
Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t. We keep our skulls. So.
He disappeared. This was only last week, and already I don’t remember what shattered the enchantment. I think I blinked, I think I retrieved my brain from the weasel’s brain, and tried to memorize what I was seeing, and the weasel felt the yank of separation, the careening splashdown into real life and the urgent current of instinct. He vanished under the wild rose. I waited motionless, my mind suddenly full of data and my spirit with pleadings, but he didn’t return.
Please do not tell me about “approach-avoidance conflicts.” I tell you I’ve been in that weasel’s brain for sixty second, and he was in mine. Brains are private places, muttering through unique and secret tapes—but the weasel and I both plugged into another tape simultaneously, for a sweet and shocking time. Can I help it if it was a blank?
What goes on in his brain the rest of the time? What does a weasel think about? He won’t say. His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose-leaf, and blown.
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don’t think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular—shall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands?—but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel’s: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
I missed my chance. I should have gone for the throat. I should have lunged for that streak of white under the weasel’s chin and held on, held on through mud and into the wild rose, held on for the dearer life. We could live under the wild rose wild as weasels, mute and uncomprehending. I could very calmly go wild. I could live two days in the den, curled, leaning on mouse fur, sniffing bird bones, blinking, licking, breathing musk, my hair tangled in the roots of grasses. Down is a good place to go, where the mind is single. Down is out, out of your ever-loving mind and back to your careless senses. I remember muteness as a prolonged and giddy fast, where every moment is a feast of utterance received. Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested directly, like blood pulsed into my gut through a jugular vein. Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to located the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t “attack” anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.
About the author
Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, best known for her narrative nonfiction. After graduating from high school, Dillard attended Hollins College, in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied literature and creative writing. In 1968 she graduated with an MA in English, after writing a thesis on Thoreau's Walden. Dillard spent the first few years after graduation painting and writing, publishing several poems and short stories. After a near-fatal bout of pneumonia in 1971, Dillard began Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She spent eight years living near Tinker Creek, a suburban area surrounded by forests, creeks, mountains, and myriad animal life. The finished book brought her a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, when she was 29. She then moved to Washington, as a writer in residence at Western Washington University. In Washington, she wrote Holy the Firm. She has also written a memoir about growing up in Pittsburgh, An American Childhood, and two novels, The Living, and The Maytrees. Dillard taught for many years as a distinguished visiting professor in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut. “Living Like Weasels” is taken from her non-fiction work Teaching a Stone To Talk published in 1982.
Vocabulary:
stalk, split, crunch, pry, dangle, pounce, swivel, gut, plod, upholster, ensconce, stun, dismantle, careen, lunge, ingest, unhinge
weasel, carcass, talon, jugular vein, prey, muskrat, rattlesnake, blackbird, black leeches, crayfish, carp, steer
airborne, horizontal, tremulous, marshy, thorny, shaggy, giddy
shallowness, bottomland, terra firma, suburbia, lichen, lily pads, pendant, grate, enchantment, yank, splashdown, fast
plug into, pry…off, let go, pounce on, attach to, stunned into… hold on, yield to,
Questions for discussion:
1. What descriptive details has Dillard used, in the first paragraph, to portray the weasel? Are they effective in forming an image of the weasel? Which of the weasel’s attributes impresses you most?
2. How does the second paragraph follow the first, both in terms of language and content? How do the two anecdotes reinforce one another and add to the tenacity in the image of the weasel?
3. Where did Dillard see a weasel? How does Dillard set the scene of her encounter with the weasel? What effects has she achieved?
4. How does Dillard describe her feelings when her eyes met the weasel’s? What is unusual about the encounter? Why is the encounter so startling? In what sense has the locked glance transformed her?
5. What is the difference between a man’s life and a weasel’s? What has evoked Dillard’s reflections on the feasibility, or rather the necessity of living like weasels?
6. How should we humans live, according to Dillard? By instinct and necessity like a weasel? What would that mean? Does she really want to go wild?
7. Why does living like weasels appeal to her? What is the message she wants to send to her readers?
Exercises:
I. Fill in the blanks with the proper forms of the following words and add prepositions and adverbs where necessary. Each word can be used only once.
pounce, attach, pry, hold, obedient, let go, stun, yield
1) The police on Tuesday found a "suspicious device" _______ a city police car, four days after two men were arrested in connection with a series of violent attacks.
2) Thousands of people, who had turned out to cheer their leader on a sunny autumn day, ________ silence when the president was shot in the street.
3) The lions hid behind the bushes, ready to ________ any antelopes that happened to pass by.
4) The seamen wouldn’t _______ the pirates and fought them off repeatedly. But the pirates wouldn’t _______. The seamen _________ for two days and three nights before a warship came to their rescue.
5) Katherine, who habitually _______ his father, has rejected John’s marriage proposal on ground of her father’s objection.
6) The man pulled out the heavy box from beneath a truck, ______the lid and found, to his dismay, nothing in it except solid bricks.
II. Insert one word in each line:
In recent article for the New York Times, Ms. Oates suggested that “Memoir testifies, perhaps, to our desperate wish that some truth of the spirit presented to us, though we know it’s probably invented. We want to believe! We are a who
clamors to be lied.” I am not going to address, at least directly, what I consider
be the depressingly elitist, cynical, and patronizing tone of Ms. Oates’ observations. Rather, I would like to suggest what people desperately want, they’ve always wanted, is not to be lied to, but to be a story. And if nonfiction is burning up the best seller lists, it’s not memoirists have learned to become better liars than fiction writers; maybe it’s because they’re just telling better story.
In a 1997 interview, fiction writer and essayist Bob Shacochis commented the underlying hostility the literary community over the “appropriation” of traditional fiction—dialogue, scene construction, vividly recollected detail—into today’s nonfiction. The real issue, he says, is the quality storytelling, not whether it’s invented remembered, and “beyond that the arguments become uninteresting, and they get precious. If someone you that the memoir or essay is this certain thing, they’re really not telling you they know so much as they’re telling you what they’ve read. It doesn’t address the magnitude and diversity what’s been done, or being done out there. They try to tell you that “objectivity” is the rule in nonfiction, I regard subjectivity as the greater witness” (No word is missing in this line).
Keys:
I 1. attached to 2. were stunned into 3. pounce on 4. yield to, let go, held on 5. obedient to 6. pried…off
II 1. in a 2. be presented 3. species who 4. lied to 5. to be 6 what they’ve 7. told a story 8. not because 9. a better story 10. commented on/upon 11. within the literary 12. fiction technique 13. quality of 14. or remembered 15. tells you 16. what they know 17. of what 18. where/while I regard
小说下载尽在http://bbs.txtnovel.com---书香门第【celiatf】整理
附：【本作品来自互联网,本人不做任何负责】内容版权归作者所有!
