Intricacy
- Chapter 8 is aptly named—it's probably the most intricate one in the book so far. It's also the last chapter of the via positiva section.
- You may recall that Dillard has a goldfish named Ellery Channing. We're sure it's no surprise that she's staring intently at its tail, contemplating its circulatory system.
- The fact that she and Ellery both have red blood cells leads to a lengthy contemplation of the nature of time and of, well, nature.
- Chloroplasts, magnesium atoms, nuclei, subatomic particles, neutrinos, etc. In other words, stuff is made of other, infinitely smaller stuff. But where did the first stuff come from?
- The more Dillard thinks about the Roanoke Valley, the more she realizes nature is gratuitous. No individual tree or fish or water bug is crucial to the world or its creator. (She's going to assume for this chapter that there's a creator.)
- She can't deal with the enormity of the question of how it all started, so she's decided to concern herself with how it all works. The intricacy of creation is her jam.
- Here's her basic definition: Intricacy is decoration over nothingness.
- Why God would get so detailed with the creations rather than just roughing them in is the great mystery of the universe—after all, stuff doesn't need to look pretty, it just needs to work.
- We're thinking Steve Jobs would have something to say about that, but we digress.
- "Evolution is the vehicle of intricacy," she says. Say what?
- Okay, so what she means is that when you have a stable basic thing—a tree trunk, for example—an intricate system of branches and leaves can sprout off from that, and still more intricate leaves and flowers and fruit can sprout off from the branches.
- Dillard's obsessed with collecting trivia about nature (you think?), but it seems to her as though other people can't be bothered with this tree and frog and mantis stuff—she's noticed that they back away from her at parties.
- We're not sure why you wouldn't want to roll with someone who pontificates about human kidneys. And in case you were wondering, they're intricate, what with their proximal segments of tubules and such.
- This creator, Dillard reasons, didn't just create everything; he'll create anything—he might not know when to stop creating.
- Landscape, she says, is "the texture of intricacy." What she wants to do is "add time to the texture" and create a landscape that scrolls on forever. Not that she's an overachiever or anything.
- She had a vision last year, she says. It was like a dream, except she was awake. She was watching the history of the Earth, and it looked like a tweed scarf. She couldn't figure out where the present was located, couldn't place herself in it.
- However, as she looked at the scarf, it began to grow more detailed until it became a globe, and she was able to pick out France, and she got all nostalgic for her own time period.
- A geographer and mathematician named John Dee, she tells us, suggested that if you could shoot a mirror into space faster than the speed of light, you could look into the mirror and see history.
- She decides that intricacy leads to hardiness, and hardiness is complex. In other words, you have to keep evolving and branching out if you want to live.