Meditation: The Gaps

I have just finished Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (by Annie Dillard) for the second time. This time around, I bookmarked and dogeared and underlined and re-read passages, desperate for the words to permeate.

In a day or two, I will have forgotten everything.

I would marry this woman if she were not twice my age, not already married, and wasn't a smoker. (She may not be a smoker anymore.) Of course, she wrote this panegyric to life when she was in her twenties, in 1974, the year I was born.

I must type a quote from one of the final pages. Hopefully I won't get sued.

Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have "not gone up into the
gaps." The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home,
the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can
discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps
are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they
are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy
narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the
gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the
gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock--more than a
maple--a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow
morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You
can't take it with you.