Annie Dillard... We wake up a thousand times a day and laugh.

I wrote this out for a friend a little while back...

I hate to take this out of context, because it's the punch-line in a book I would recommend to most anyone, but particularly to someone as honest as you. This comes from the book I started to read to you the other day. The one that starts... "Every day is a god, each day is god, and holiness holds forth in time." It's the story of a writing professor trying to make sense of existence and god after having spent the day with a girl who was in a plane crash when she that burned her face and neck badly. I guess it's about trying to live with suffering, and that is probably why it resonates deeply with me. My favorite part is in bold.

"She saw me watching her and we exchanged a look, a very conscious and self-conscious look - because we look a bit alike and we both knew it; because she was still short and I grown; because I was stuck kneeling before the cider pail, looking at her sidewise over my shoulder; because she was carrying the cat so oddly, so that she had to walk with her long legs parted; because it was my cat, and she'd dressed it, and it looked like a nun; and because she knew I'd been watching her, and how fondly, all along. We were laughing.

We looked a bit alike. Her face is slaughtered now, and I don't remember mine. It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools - that we are sown into time like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone. The joke part is that we forget it. Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it's Pythagoras. We wake up a thousand times a day and laugh. 

The joke of the world is less like a banana peel than a rake, the old rake in the grass, the one you step on, foot to forehead. It all comes together. In a twinkling. You have to admire the gag for its symmetry, accomplishing all with one right angle, the same right angle which accomplishes all philosophy. One step on the rake and it's mind under matter once again. You wake up with a piece of tree in your skull. You wake up with fruit on your hands. You wake up in a clearing and see yourself, ashamed. You see your own face and it's seven years old and there's no knowing why, or where you've been since. We're tossed broadcast into time like so much grass, some ravening god's sweet hay. You wake up and a plane falls out of the sky." (p. 41-42)

The joke part is that we forget...  This excerpt comes from Holy the Firm.

p.s. I can't believe Annie Dillard named a book For the Time Being because I thought I was the only one who played with that phrase... 

Also p.s., the painting above is one by Dillard titled Summer 1936

http://www.anniedillard.com/