American Childhood

...These are among her best sentences...

...And she has the strength of her rejections...

...Augustine's Confessions...

...A good deal of her book is devoted to her delineation of what it meant to be part of that stratum of Pittsburgh Presbyterian society that was at one time (and still is, by and large) the economic power base of the city...

...It inculcated in her a sense of responsibility for her own perceptions, and this sense was tinged with a sense of almost religious gratitude...

...For that she needs to be praised, or, as we say in Pittsburgh, she needs praised...

...What impresses me most about Dillard's work, whether I find myself agreeing with it or not, is her casual discard of an insight, a kind of imaginative throwaway...

...I don't remember whether she wrote it or said it, but somewhere at some time Annie Dillard wrote or said that we have eyes primarily so that we can read...

...The other quality in her highly focused style as a writer may have grown out of the fact that she was the proud owner of a microscope as a child, and she used it to examine a specimen of her own blood, her urine and, finally and triumphantly, an amoeba...

...Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me...

...In an earlier work she wrote: "Cruelty's a mystery and a waste of pain.'' Now that's a statement...

...She is a writer to whom minutiae are important, as they certainly are to an artist and a microscopist...

...She comes across as a voracious reader, and her outlook as a reader has the same wonder and honesty as her outlook as an observer of the natural world and its varied populations, i.e., human, animal, botanical, and mineral...

...Knowledge wasn't a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being — whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars...

...Not that her family was affluent...

...She is someone on whom very little is lost, and, as her reportage from China revealed in Encounters with Chinese Writers, this is as much of an asset to an essayist or memoirist as it is to a reporter...

...The convergence occurs elsewhere as well...

...You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn't known...

...The important thing to say is that this is an honest book, a book where the writing is really written...

...It is a kind of gratitude, I think — the gratitude 636 of the ten-year-old who wakes up to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world...

...If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire...

...And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another...

...Judging from her own admissions and descriptions, she was raised in a middle- to upper-middle class neighborhood, went to a private school for girls, and was something of a tomboy — playing baseball, wanting to play football, throwing ice-balls at passing cars (she was caught once, memorably), smoking cigarettes like a truant in high school, dating the boys in her stratum...

...That she was just a young girl when she read these works might explain her antipathy, but still she knew what she liked and didn't like...

...The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me...

...The writer in her began to grow when she discovered the Carnegie Library in Homewood, when she browsed around the Museum of Natural History in the Carnegie Institute (now re-christened simply The Carnegie), when she, in her own way, rebelled in order to discover herself...

...The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie's rim as you climbed its cliffs...

...What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children...

...For a writer that is as important as talent itself...

...it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim...

...She notices and describes the texture of human skin, the hair on that skin, the follicles out of which the hairs sprout...

...One is that she drew as a child, drew sketches of a baseball mitt, a shoe, faces of people from memory...

...The city in which Annie Dillard (born Annie Doak) grew up was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania...

...it's one of 637 those lines that it is impossible to forget...

...And where the talent and the love of her subject converge, as they do in the superb chapter on her mother, Annie Dillard is the best possible Annie Dillard...

...Cumulatively, each of these things opened her to the sheer joy of living...

...She even concentrates on a single hair...

...These things may seem trivial, but they are, I think, indicative of an identifiable strain that runs through all her work...

...I have no doubt that she meant and still means it...

...These facts are interesting but not of crucial importance to the development of Dillard as a writer, and this book, it must be remembered, is finally the autobiography of a mind, not simply an autobiographical reminiscence...

...She thought The Education of Henry Adams was "awful," and she thought the same of Joyce's Ulysses and St...

...There are not as many of those lines in this book as I would have liked, and occasionally some of the minutiae seem to become ends in themselves (not the world in a grain of sand but just a grain of sand), and the last chapter with its rhapsodic nostalgia is a chapter that could have been left out (the book could have ended on page 150 and finished stronger, in my opinion), but these are personal quibbles that I may eventually come to withdraw...

...ATTENTION MUST BE PAID AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD Annie Dillard Harper & Row, $17.95, 255 pp.________ Samuel Hazo Two things are revealed in this personal reminiscence by Annie Dillard that say much about why she writes as she does...