Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

annie dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for Richard It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out. —HERACLITUS Contents Epigraph 1 Heaven and Earth in Jest iii 3 2 Seeing 16 3 Winter 37 4 The Fixed 55 5 Untying the Knot 73 6 The Present 78 7 Spring 105 8 Intricacy 124 9 Flood 149 10 Fecundity 161 11 Stalking 184 12 Nightwatch 209 13 The Horns of the Altar 225 14 Northing 247 15 The Waters of Separation 265 Afterword 278 More Years Afterward 283 About Annie Dillard 285 About the Author Other Books By Annie Dillard Cover CopyrightAbout the Publisher Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 1 Heaven and Earth in Jest I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I’d half-awaken. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his b ack, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never 4 / Annie Dillard knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover.We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence†¦. â€Å"Seem like we’re just set down here,† a woman said to me recently, à ¢â‚¬Å"and don’t nobody know why. † These are morning matters, pictures you dream as the final wave heaves you up on the sand to the bright light and drying air. You remember pressure, and a curved sleep you rested against, soft, like a scallop in its shell. But the air hardens your skin; you stand; you leave the lighted shore to explore some dim headland, and soon you’re lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing.I still think of that old tomcat, mornings, when I wake. Things are tamer now; I sleep with the window shut. The cat and our rites are gone and my life is changed, but the memory remains of something powerful playing over me. I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing. If I’m lucky I might be jogged awake by a strange bird call. I dress in a hurry, imagining the yard flapping with auks, or flamingos. This morning it was a wood duck, down at the creek. It flew away. I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blu e Ridge.An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks—Tinker and Carvin’s—are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 5 hat providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection. The mountains—Tinker and Brushy, McAfee’s Knob and Dead Man—are a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will.The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home. The wood duck flew away. I caught only a glimpse of something like a bright torpedo that blasted the leaves where it flew. Back at the house I ate a bowl of oatmeal; much later in the day came the long slant of light that means good walking. If the day is fine, any walk will do; it all looks good. Water in particular looks its best, reflecting blue sky in the flat, and chopping it into graveled shallows and white chute and foam in the riffles. On a dark day, or a hazy one, everything’s washed-out and lackluster but the water.It carries its own lights. I set out for the railroad tracks, for the hill the floc ks fly over, for the woods where the white mare lives. But I go to the water. Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet. Kazantzakis says that when he was young he had a canary and a globe. When he freed the canary, it would perch on the globe and sing.All his life, wandering the earth, he felt as though he had a canary on top of his mind, singing. West of the house, Tinker Creek makes a sharp loop, so 6 / Annie Dillard that the creek is both in back of the house, south of me, and also on the other side of the road, north of me. I like to go north. There the afternoon sun hits the creek just right, deepening the reflected blue and lighting the sides of trees on the banks. Steers from the pasture across the creek come down to drink; I always f lush a rabbit or two there; I sit on a fallen trunk in the shade and watch the squirrels in the sun.There are two separated wooden fences suspended from cables that cross the creek just upstream from my tree-trunk bench. They keep the steers from escaping up or down the creek when they come to drink. Squirrels, the neighborhood children, and I use the downstream fence as a swaying bridge across the creek. But the steers are there today. I sit on the downed tree and watch the black steers slip on the creek bottom. They are all bred beef: beef heart, beef hide, beef hocks. They’re a human product like rayon. They’re like a field of shoes.They have cast-iron shanks and tongues like foam insoles. You can’t see through to their brains as you can with other animals; they have beef fat behind their eyes, beef stew. I cross the fence six feet above the water, walking my hands down the rusty cable and tightroping my feet along the narrow edge of the planks. When I hit th e other bank and terra firma, some steers are bunched in a knot between me and the barbedwire fence I want to cross. So I suddenly rush at them in an enthusiastic sprint, flailing my arms and hollering, â€Å"Lightning! Copperhead! Swedish meatballs! They flee, still in a knot, stumbling across the flat pasture. I stand with the wind on my face. When I slide under a barbed-wire fence, cross a field, and run over a sycamore trunk felled across the water, I’m on a little island shaped like a tear in the middle of Tinker Creek. On one side of the creek is a steep forested bank; the water is swift and deep on that side of the island. On the other side is the level field I walked Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 7 through next to the steers’ pasture; the water between the field and the island is shallow and sluggish.In summer’s low water, flags and bulrushes grow along a series of shallow pools cooled by the lazy current. Water striders patrol the surface film, crayfish hu mp along the silt bottom eating filth, frogs shout and glare, and shiners and small bream hide among roots from the sulky green heron’s eye. I come to this island every month of the year. I walk around it, stopping and staring, or I straddle the sycamore log over the creek, curling my legs out of the water in winter, trying to read. Today I sit on dry grass at the end of the island by the slower side of the creek. I’m drawn to this spot.I come to it as to an oracle; I return to it as a man years later will seek out the battlefield where he lost a leg or an arm. A couple of summers ago I was walking along the edge of the island to see what I could see in the water, and mainly to scare frogs. Frogs have an inelegant way of taking off from invisible positions on the bank just ahead of your feet, in dire panic, emitting a froggy â€Å"Yike! † and splashing into the water. Incredibly, this amused me, and, incredibly, it amuses me still. As I walked along the grassy e dge of the island, I got better and better at seeing frogs both in and out of the water.I learned to recognize, slowing down, the difference in texture of the light reflected from mud bank, water, grass, or frog. Frogs were flying all around me. At the end of the island I noticed a small green frog. He was exactly half in and half out of the water, looking like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didn’t jump. He didn’t jump; I crept closer. At last I knelt on the island’s winter killed grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in the creek just four feet away. He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag.The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin 8 / Annie Dillard emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and ru mple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag started to sink.I had read about the giant water bug, but never seen one. â€Å"Giant water bug† is really the name of the creature, which is an enormous, heavy-bodied brown bug. It eats insects, tadpoles, fish, and frogs. Its grasping forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes a victim with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the only bite it ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim’s muscles and bones and organs—all but the skin—and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim’s body, reduced to a juice.This event is quite common in warm fresh water. The frog I saw was being sucked by a giant water bug. I had been kneeling on the island grass; when the unrecognizable flap of frog skin settled on the creek bottom, swaying, I stood up and brushed the knees of my pants. I couldn’t catch my breath. Of course, many carnivorous animals devour their prey alive. The usual method seems to be to subdue the victim by downing or grasping it so it can’t flee, then eating it whole or in a series of bloody bites. Frogs eat everything whole, stuffing prey into their mouths with their thumbs.People have seen frogs with their wide jaws so full of live dragonflies they couldn’t close them. Ants don’t even have to catch their prey: in the spring they swarm over newly hatched, featherless birds in the nest and eat them tiny bite by bite. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 9 That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But a t the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, â€Å"The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest? † It’s a good question.What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator’s, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? God is subtle,† Einstein said, â€Å"but not malicious. † Again, Einstein said that â€Å"nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning. † It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God â€Å"set bars and doors† and said, â€Å"Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further. † But have we come even that far?Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat? Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who? ), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a 10 / Annie Dillard traight vertical de scent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star. The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass.I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. Another time I saw another wonder: sharks off the At lantic coast of Florida. There is a way a wave rises above the ocean horizon, a triangular wedge against the sky. If you stand where the ocean breaks on a shallow beach, you see the raised water in a wave is translucent, shot with lights.One late afternoon at low tide a hundred big sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a feeding frenzy. As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six-or eight-footlong bodies of twisting sharks. The sharks disappeared as each wave rolled toward me; then a new wave would swell above the horizon, containing in it, like scorpions in amber, sharks that roiled and heaved. The sight held awesome wonders: power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence. We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous vents are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 11 millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammer ed out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, â€Å"Come down to the water. † It was an extravagant gesture, but we can’t do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has een on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames. I have come to the grassy island late in the day. The creek is up; icy water sweeps under the sycamore log bridge. The frog skin, of course, is utterly gone. I have stared at that one spot on the creek bottom for so long, focusing past the rush of water, that when I stand, the opposite bank seems to stretch before my eyes and flow grassily upstream.When the bank settles down I cross the sycamore log and enter again the big plowed field next to the steers’ pasture. The wind is terrific out of the west; the sun comes and goes. I can see the shadow on the field before me deepen uniformly and spread like a plague. Everything seems so dull I am 12 / Annie Dillard amazed I can even distinguish objects. And suddenly the light runs across the land like a comber, and up the trees, a nd goes again in a wink: I think I’ve gone blind or died. When it comes again, the light, you hold your breath, and if it stays you forget about it until it goes again.It’s the most beautiful day of the year. At four o’clock the eastern sky is a dead stratus black flecked with low white clouds. The sun in the west illuminates the ground, the mountains, and especially the bare branches of trees, so that everywhere silver trees cut into the black sky like a photographer’s negative of a landscape. The air and the ground are dry; the mountains are going on and off like neon signs. Clouds slide east as if pulled from the horizon, like a tablecloth whipped off a table. The hemlocks by the barbed-wire fence are flinging themselves east as though their backs would break.Purple shadows are racing east; the wind makes me face east, and again I feel the dizzying, drawn sensation I felt when the creek bank reeled. At four-thirty the sky in the east is clear; how coul d that big blackness be blown? Fifteen minutes later another darkness is coming overhead from the northwest; and it’s here. Everything is drained of its light as if sucked. Only at the horizon do inky black mountains give way to distant, lighted mountains—lighted not by direct illumination but rather paled by glowing sheets of mist hung before them. Now the blackness is in the east; verything is half in shadow, half in sun, every clod, tree, mountain, and hedge. I can’t see Tinker Mountain through the line of hemlock, till it comes on like a streetlight, ping, ex nihilo. Its sandstone cliffs pink and swell. Suddenly the light goes; the cliffs recede as if pushed. The sun hits a clump of sycamores between me and the mountains; the sycamore arms light up, and I can’t see the cliffs. They’re gone. The pale network of sycamore arms, which a second ago was transparent as a screen, is suddenly Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 13 opaque, glowing with light.Now t he sycamore arms snuff out, the mountains come on, and there are the cliffs again. I walk home. By five-thirty the show has pulled out. Nothing is left but an unreal blue and a few banked clouds low in the north. Some sort of carnival magician has been here, some fasttalking worker of wonders who has the act backwards. â€Å"Something in this hand,† he says, â€Å"something in this hand, something up my sleeve, something behind my back†¦Ã¢â‚¬  and abracadabra, he snaps his fingers, and it’s all gone. Only the bland, blank-faced magician remains, in his unruffled coat, bare handed, acknowledging a smattering of baffled applause.When you look again the whole show has pulled up stakes and moved on down the road. It never stops. New shows roll in from over the mountains and the magician reappears unannounced from a fold in the curtain you never dreamed was an opening. Scarves of clouds, rabbits in plain view, disappear into the black hat forever. Presto chango. The audience, if there is an audience at all, is dizzy from head-turning, dazed. Like the bear who went over the mountain, I went out to see what I could see. And, I might as well warn you, like the bear, all that I could see was the other side of the mountain: more of same.On a good day I might catch a glimpse of another wooded ridge rolling under the sun like water, another bivouac. I propose to keep here what Thoreau called â€Å"a meteorological journal of the mind,† telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead. I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment.He hasn’t the 14 / Annie Dillard faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will ha ve learned instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why. So I think about the valley. It is my leisure as well as my work, a game.It is a fierce game I have joined because it is being played anyway, a game of both skill and chance, played against an unseen adversary—the conditions of time—in which the payoffs, which may suddenly arrive in a blast of light at any moment, might as well come to me as anyone else. I stake the time I’m grateful to have, the energies I’m glad to direct. I risk getting stuck on the board, so to speak, unable to move in any direction, which happens enough, God knows; and I risk the searing, exhausting nightmares that plunder rest and fo rce me face down all night long in some muddy ditch seething with hatching insects and crustaceans.But if I can bear the nights, the days are a pleasure. I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell. I am an explorer, then, and I am also a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself. Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves â€Å"lightning marks,† because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees.The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 15 dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow in to whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. Something pummels us, something barely sheathed. Power broods and lights.We’re played on like a pipe; our breath is not our own. James Houston describes two young Eskimo girls sitting cross-legged on the ground, mouth on mouth, blowing by turns each other’s throat cords, making a low, unearthly music. When I cross again the bridge that is really the steers’ fence, the wind has thinned to the delicate air of twilight; it crumples the water’s skin. I watch the running sheets of light raised on the creek’s surface. The sight has the appeal of the purely passive, like the racing of light under clouds on a field, the beautiful dream at the moment of being dreamed.The breeze is the merest puff, but you yourself sail headlong and breathless under the gale force of the sp irit. 2 Seeing When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always â€Å"hid† the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk.Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 17 I wou ld be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.It is still the first week in January, and I’ve got great plans. I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight of a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way?It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get. I used to be able to see flying insects in the air. I’d look ahead and see, not the row of hemlocks across the road, but the air in front of it. My eyes would focus along that column of air, picking out flying insects.But I lost interest, I guess, for I dropped the habit. Now I can see birds. Probably some people can look at the grass at their feet and discover all the crawling creatures. I would like to know grasses and sedges—and care. Then my least journey into the world would be a field trip, a series of happy recognitions. Thoreau, in an expansive mood, exulted, â€Å"What a rich book might be made about buds, including, perhaps, sprouts! † It would be nice to think so. I cherish mental images I have of three perfectly happy people. One collects stones.Another—an Englishman, say—watches clouds. The third lives on a coast and collects drops of seawater which 18 / Annie Dillard he examines microscopically an d mounts. But I don’t see what the specialist sees, and so I cut myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the various forms of happiness. Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-youdon’t affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.These disappearances stun me into stillness and concentration; they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven veils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal: now-you-don’t-see-it, now-you-do. For a week last September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the back of the house. One day I went out to investigate the racket; I walked up to a tree, an Osage orange, and a hundred birds flew away.They simply material ized out of the tree. I saw a tree, then a whisk of color, then a tree again. I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds took flight. Not a branch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparently weightless as well as invisible. Or, it was as if the leaves of the Osage orange had been freed from a spell in the form of red-winged blackbirds; they flew from the tree, caught my eye in the sky, and vanished. When I looked again at the tree the leaves had reassembled as if nothing had happened.Finally I walked directly to the trunk of the tree and a final hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, and vanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? The Osage orange, unruffled, looked just as it had looked from the house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirds cried from its crown. I looked downstream where they flew, and they were gone. Searching, I couldn’t spot one. I wandered downstream to force them to play their hand, but they’d crossed the c reek and scattered. One show to a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 19 customer.These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees. It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot? Specialists can find the most incredibly wellhidden things. A book I read when I was young recommended an easy way to find caterpillars to rear: you simply find some fresh caterpillar droppings, look up, and there’s your caterpillar.More recently an author advised me to set my mind at ease about those piles of cut stems on the ground in grassy fields. Field mice make them; they cut the grass down by degrees to reach the seeds at the head. It seems that when the grass is tightly packed, as in a field of ripe grain, the blade won’t topple at a single cut through the stem; instead , the cut stem simply drops vertically, held in the crush of grain. The mouse severs the bottom again and again, the stem keeps dropping an inch at a time, and finally the head is low enough for the mouse to reach the seeds.Meanwhile, the mouse is positively littering the field with its little piles of cut stems into which, presumably, the author of the book is constantly stumbling. If I can’t see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open. I’m always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I’ve not seen one. I bang on hollow trees near water, but so far no flying squirrels have appeared. In flat country I watch every sunset in hopes of seeing the green ray.The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurting fountain at the moment of sunset; it throbs into the sky for two seconds and disappears. One more reason to ke ep my eyes open. A photography professor at the University of Florida just happened to 20 / Annie Dillard see a bird die in midflight; it jerked, died, dropped, and smashed on the ground. I squint at the wind because I read Stewart Edward White: â€Å"I have always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could see the wind—the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris fleeing high in the air. White was an excellent observer, and devoted an entire chapter of The Mountains to the subject of seeing deer: â€Å"As soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificial obvious, then you too will see deer. † But the artificial obvious is hard to see. My eyes account for less than one percent of the weight of my head; I’m bony and dense; I see what I expect. I once spent a full three minutes looking at a bullfrog that was so unexpectedly large I couldn’t see it even though a dozen enthusiastic campers were shouting directions.Finally I asked, â€Å"What color am I looking for? † and a fellow said, â€Å"Green. † When at last I picked out the frog, I saw what painters are up against: the thing wasn’t green at all, but the color of wet hickory bark. The lover can see, and the knowledgeable. I visited an aunt and uncle at a quarter-horse ranch in Cody, Wyoming. I couldn’t do much of anything useful, but I could, I thought, draw. So, as we all sat around the kitchen table after supper, I produced a sheet of paper and drew a horse. â€Å"That’s one lame horse,† my aunt volunteered.The rest of the family joined in: â€Å"Only place to saddle that one is his neck†; â€Å"Looks like we better shoot the poor thing, on account of those terrible growths. † Meekly, I slid the pencil and paper down the table. Everyone in that family, including my three young cousins, could draw a horse. Beautifully. When the paper came back it looked as though five shining, real quarter horses had been corralled by mistake with a papier-mache moose; the real horses seemed to gaze at the monster with a steady, puzzled air. I stay away from horses now, but I can do a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 21 creditable goldfish.The point is that I just don’t know what the lover knows; I just can’t see the artificial obvious that those in the know construct. The herpetologist asks the native, â€Å"Are there snakes in that ravine? † â€Å"Nosir. † And the herpetologist comes home with, yessir, three bags full. Are there butterflies on that mountain? Are the bluets in bloom, are there arrowheads here, or fossil shells in the shale? Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me.A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: â€Å"This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is. † A fog that won’t burn away drifts and flows across my field of vision. When you see fog move against a backdrop of deep pines, you don’t see the fog itself, but streaks of clearness floating across the air in dark shreds.So I see only tatters of clearness through a pervading obscurity. I can’t distinguish the fog from the overcast sky; I can’t be sure if the light is direct or reflected. Everywhere darkness and the presence of the unseen appalls. We estimate now that only one atom dances alone in every cubic meter of intergalactic space. I blink and squint. What planet or power yanks Halley’s Comet out of orbit? We haven’t seen that force yet; it’s a question of distance, density, and the pallor of reflected light. We rock, cradled in the swaddling band of darkness.Even the simple darkness of night whispers suggestions to the mind. Last summer, in August, I stayed at the creek too late. 22 / Annie Dillard Where Tinker Creek flows under the sycamore log bridge to the tear-shaped island, it is slow and shallow, fringed thinly in cattail marsh. At this spot an astonishing bloom of life supports vast breeding populations of insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. On windless summer evenings I stalk along the creek bank or straddle the sycamore log in absolute stillness, watching for muskrats.The night I stayed too late I was hunched on the log staring spellbound at spreading, reflected stains of lilac on the water. A cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if turned on by a switch; its reflection just as suddenly materialized on the water upstream, flat and floating, so that I couldn’t see the creek bottom, or life in the water under the cloud. Downstream, away from the cloud on the water, water turtles smooth as beans were gliding down with the current in a series of easy, weightless push-offs, as men bound on the moon.I didn’t know whether to trace the progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking sticking my face in one of the bridge’s spiderwebs made invisible by the gathering dark, or take a chance on seeing the carp, or scan the mud bank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trailed it after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying upstream with their tails forked, so fast. But shadows spread, and deepened, and stayed. After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests.I stirred. A land turtle on the bank, startled, hissed the air from its lungs and withdrew into its shell. An uneasy pink here, an unfathomable blue th ere, gave great suggestion of lurking beings. Things were going on. I couldn’t see whether that sere rustle I heard was a distant rattlesnake, slit-eyed, or a nearby sparrow kicking in the dry flood debris slung at the foot of a willow. Tremendous action Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 23 roiled the water everywhere I looked, big action, inexplicable. A tremor welled up beside a gaping muskrat burrow in the bank and I caught my breath, but no muskrat appeared.The ripples continued to fan upstream with a steady, powerful thrust. Night was knitting over my face an eyeless mask, and I still sat transfixed. A distant airplane, a delta wing out of nightmare, made a gliding shadow on the creek’s bottom that looked like a stingray cruising upstream. At once a black fin slit the pink cloud on the water, shearing it in two. The two halves merged together and seemed to dissolve before my eyes. Darkness pooled in the cleft of the creek and rose, as water collects in a well. Untamed, dr eaming lights flickered over the sky. I saw hints of hulking underwater shadows, two pale splashes out of the water, and ound ripples rolling close together from a blackened center. At last I stared upstream where only the deepest violet remained of the cloud, a cloud so high its underbelly still glowed feeble color reflected from a hidden sky lighted in turn by a sun halfway to China. And out of that violet, a sudden enormous black body arced over the water. I saw only a cylindrical sleekness. Head and tail, if there was a head and tail, were both submerged in cloud. I saw only one ebony fling, a headlong dive to darkness; then the waters closed, and the lights went out. I walked home in a shivering daze, up hill and down.Later I lay open-mouthed in bed, my arms flung wide at my sides to steady the whirling darkness. At this latitude I’m spinning 836 miles an hour round the earth’s axis; I often fancy I feel my sweeping fall as a breakneck arc like the dive of dolphin s, and the hollow rushing of wind raises hair on my neck and the side of my face. In orbit around the sun I’m moving 64,800 miles an hour. The solar system as a whole, like a merry-go-round unhinged, spins, bobs, and blinks at the speed of 43,200 miles an hour along a course set east of Hercules. Someone has 24 / Annie Dillard iped, and we are dancing a tarantella until the sweat pours. I open my eyes and I see dark, muscled forms curl out of water, with flapping gills and flattened eyes. I close my eyes and I see stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper stars bowing to deepest stars at the crown of an infinite cone. â€Å"Still,† wrote van Gogh in a letter, â€Å"a great deal of light falls on everything. † If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terror results. Peter Freuchen describes the notorious kayak sickness to which Greenland Eskimos are prone. The Greenland fjords are p eculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away†¦. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirrorlike water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking†¦.Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls. † Some hunters are especially cursed with this panic, and bring ruin and sometimes starvation to their families. Sometimes here in Virginia at sunset low clouds on the southern or northern horizon are completely invisible in the lighted sky. I only know one is there because I can see its reflection in still water. T he first time I discovered this mystery I looked from cloud to no-cloud in bewilderment, checking my bearings over and over, thinking maybe the ark of the covenant was just passing by south of Dead Man Mountain.Only much later did I read the explanation: polarized light from the sky is very much weakened by reflection, but the light Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 25 in clouds isn’t polarized. So invisible clouds pass among visible clouds, till all slide over the mountains; so a greater light extinguishes a lesser as though it didn’t exist. In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss. They’re out there showering down, committing hara-kiri in a flame of fatal attraction, and hissing perhaps at last into the ocean.But at dawn what looks like a blue dome clamps down over me like a lid on a pot. The stars and planets could smash and I’d never know. Only a piece of ashen moon occasionally climbs up or down the insi de of the dome, and our local star without surcease explodes on our heads. We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever.Darkness appalls and light dazzles; the scrap of visible light that doesn’t hurt my eyes hurts my brain. What I see sets me swaying. Size and distance and the sudden swelling of meanings confuse me, bowl me over. I straddle the sycamore log bridge over Tinker Creek in the summer. I look at the lighted creek bottom: snail tracks tunnel the mud in quavering curves. A crayfish jerks, but by the time I absorb what has happened, he’s gone in a billowing smokescreen of silt. I look at the water: minnows and shiners. If I’m thinking minnows, a carp will fill my brain till I scream.I look at the water’ s surface: skaters, bubbles, and leaves sliding down. Suddenly, my own face, reflected, startles me witless. Those snails have been tracking my face! Finally, with a shuddering wrench of the will, I see clouds, cirrus clouds. I’m dizzy, I fall in. This looking business is risky. Once I stood on a humped rock on nearby Purgatory Mountain, watching through binoculars the great autumn 26 / Annie Dillard hawk migration below, until I discovered that I was in danger of joining the hawks on a vertical migration of my own.I was used to binoculars, but not, apparently, to balancing on humped rocks while looking through them. I staggered. Everything advanced and receded by turns; the world was full of unexplained foreshortenings and depths. A distant huge tan object, a hawk the size of an elephant, turned out to be the browned bough of a nearby loblolly pine. I followed a sharp-shinned hawk against a featureless sky, rotating my head unawares as it flew, and when I lowered the glass a glimpse of my own looming shoulder sent me staggering. What prevents the men on Palomar from falling, voiceless and blinded, from their tiny, vaulted chairs?I reel in confusion; I don’t understand what I see. With the naked eye I can see two million light-years to the Andromeda galaxy. Often I slop some creek water in a jar and when I get home I dump it in a white china bowl. After the silt settles I return and see tracings of minute snails on the bottom, a planarian or two winding round the rim of water, roundworms shimmying frantically, and finally, when my eyes have adjusted to these dimensions, amoebae. At first the amoebae look like muscae volitantes, those curled moving spots you seem to see in your eyes when you stare at a distant wall.Then I see the amoebae as drops of water congealed, bluish, translucent, like chips of sky in the bowl. At length I choose one individual and give myself over to its idea of an evening. I see it dribble a grainy foot before it on its we t, unfathomable way. Do its unedited sense impressions include the fierce focus of my eyes? Shall I take it outside and show it Andromeda, and blow its little endoplasm? I stir the water with a finger, in case it’s running out of oxygen. Maybe I should get a tropical aquarium with motorized bubblers and lights, and keep this one for aPilgrim at Tinker Creek / 27 pet. Yes, it would tell its fissioned descendants, the universe is two feet by five, and if you listen closely you can hear the buzzing music of the spheres. Oh, it’s mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. It’s one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I can’t see. Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small. No culture explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are not seeing something.Galileo thought comets were an optical il lusion. This is fertile ground: since we are certain that they’re not, we can look at what our scientists have been saying with fresh hope. What if there are really gleaming, castellated cities hung upsidedown over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans always passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger. I turn from the window. I’m blind as a bat, sensing only from every direction the echo of my own thin cries.I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. When Western surgeons discovered how to perform safe cataract operations, they ranged across Europe and America operating on dozens of men and women of all ages who had been blinded by cataracts since birth. Von Senden collected accounts of such cases; the histories are fascinating. Many doctors had tested their patients’ sense perceptions and ideas of spa ce both before and after the operations. The vast majority of patients, of both sexes and all ages, had, in von Senden’s opinion, no idea of space whatsoever.Form, distance, and size were so many meaningless syllables. A patient â€Å"had no idea of depth, confusing it with roundness. † Before 28 / Annie Dillard the operation a doctor would give a blind patient a cube and a sphere; the patient would tongue it or feel it with his hands, and name it correctly. After the operation the doctor would show the same objects to the patient without letting him touch them; now he had no clue whatsoever what he was seeing. One patient called lemonade â€Å"square† because it pricked on his tongue as a square shape pricked on the touch of his hands.Of another postoperative patient, the doctor writes, â€Å"I have found in her no notion of size, for example, not even within the narrow limits which she might have encompassed with the aid of touch. Thus when I asked her to sho w me how big her mother was, she did not stretch out her hands, but set her two index-fingers a few inches apart. † Other doctors reported their patients' own statements to similar effect. â€Å"The room he was in†¦he knew to be but part of the house, yet he could not conceive that the whole house could look bigger† â€Å"Those who are blind from birth†¦have no real conception of height or distance.A house that is a mile away is thought of as nearby, but requiring the taking of a lot of steps†¦. The elevator that whizzes him up and down gives no more sense of vertical distance than does the train of horizontal. † For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning: â€Å"The girl went through the experience that we all go through and forget, the moment we are born. She saw, but it did not mean anything but a lot of different kinds of brightness. † Again, â€Å"I asked the patient what he could see; he answered that he sa w an extensive field of light, in which everything appeared dull, confused, and in motion.He could not distinguish objects. † Another patient saw â€Å"nothing but a confusion of forms and colors. † When a newly sighted girl saw photographs and paintings, she asked, â€Å"‘Why do they put those dark marks all over them? ’ ‘Those aren’t dark marks,’ her mother explained, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 29 ‘those are shadows. That is one of the ways the eye knows that things have shape. If it were not for shadows many things would look flat. ’ ‘Well, that’s how things do look,’ Joan answered. ‘Everything looks flat with dark patches. ’† But it is the patients’ concepts of space that are most revealing.One patient, according to his doctor, â€Å"practiced his vision in a strange fashion; thus he takes off one of his boots, throws it some way off in front of him, and then attempts to gau ge the distance at which it lies; he takes a few steps towards the boot and tries to grasp it; on failing to reach it, he moves on a step or two and gropes for the boot until he finally gets hold of it. † â€Å"But even at this stage, after three weeks’ experience of seeing,† von Senden goes on, â€Å"‘space,’ as he conceives it, ends with visual space, i. e. with color-patches that happen to bound his view.He does not yet have the notion that a larger object (a chair) can mask a smaller one (a dog), or that the latter can still be present even though it is not directly seen. † In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of colorpatches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult. Soon after his operation a patient â€Å"generally bumps into one of these color-patches and observes them to be substantial, since they resist him as tactual objects do.In walking about it also strikes him—or can if he pays attention—that he is continually passing in between the colors he sees, that he can go past a visual object, that a part of it then steadily disappears from view; and that in spite of this, however he twists and turns—whether entering the room from the door, for example, or returning back to it—he always has a visual space in front of him. Thus he gradually comes to realize that there is also a space behind him, which he does not see. † The mental effort involved in these reasonings proves over- 0 / Annie Dillard whelming for many patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable. It oppresses them to realize that they have been visible to people all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge or consent. A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair. â€Å"The child can see, but will not make use of his sight.Only when pressed can he with difficulty be brought to look at objects in his neighborhood; but more than a foot away it is impossible to bestir him to the necessary effort. † Of a twenty-one-year-old girl, the doctor relates, â€Å"Her unfortunate father, who had hoped for so much from this operation, wrote that his daughter carefully shuts her eyes whenever she wishes to go about the house, especially when she comes to a staircase, and that she is never happier or more at ease than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness. A fifteen-year-old boy, who was also in love with a girl at the asylum for the blind, finally blurted out, â€Å"No, really, I can’t stand it anymore; I want to be sent back to the asylum again. If things aren’t altered, I’ll tear my eye s out. † Some do learn to see, especially the young ones. But it changes their lives. One doctor comments on â€Å"the rapid and complete loss of that striking and wonderful serenity which is characteristic only of those who have never yet seen. † A blind man who learns to see is ashamed of his old habits. He dresses up, grooms himself, and tries to make a good impression.While he was blind he was indifferent to objects unless they were edible; now, â€Å"a sifting of values sets in†¦his thoughts and wishes are mightily stirred and some few of the patients are thereby led into dissimulation, envy, theft and fraud. † On the other hand, many newly sighted people speak well of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 31 the world, and teach us how dull is our own vision. To one patient, a human hand, unrecognized, is â€Å"something bright and then holes. † Shown a bunch of grapes, a boy calls out, â€Å"It is dark, blue and shiny†¦. It isn’t smooth, it ha s bumps and hollows. A little girl visits a garden. â€Å"She is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer, stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names on taking hold of it, and then as ‘the tree with the lights in it. ’† Some delight in their sight and give themselves over to the visual world. Of a patient just after her bandages were removed, her doctor writes, â€Å"The first things to attract her attention were her own hands; she looked at them very closely, moved them repeatedly to and fro, bent and stretched the fingers, and seemed greatly astonished at the sight. One girl was eager to tell her blind friend that â€Å"men do not really look like trees at all,† and astounded to discover that her every visitor had an utterly different face. Finally, a twenty-two-old girl was dazzled by the world’s brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did n ot recognize any objects, but, â€Å"the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God!How beautiful! ’† I saw color-patches for weeks after I read this wonderful book. It was summer; the peaches were ripe in the valley orchards. When I woke in the morning, color-patches wrapped round my eyes, intricately, leaving not one unfilled spot. All day long I walked among shifting color-patches that parted before me like the Red Sea and closed again in silence, transfigured, wherever I looked back. Some patches swelled and loomed, while others vanished utterly, and dark marks flitted at random 32 / Annie Dillard over the whole dazzling sweep.But I couldn’t sustain the illusion of flatness. I’ve been around for too long. Form is condemned to an eternal danse macabre with meaning: I couldn’t unpeach the pe aches. Nor can I remember ever having seen without understanding; the color-patches of infancy are lost. My brain then must have been smooth as any balloon. I’m told I reached for the moon; many babies do. But the color-patches of infancy swelled as meaning filled them; they arrayed themselves in solemn ranks down distance which unrolled and stretched before me like a plain. The moon rocketed away.I live now in a world of shadows that shape and distance color, a world where space makes a kind of terrible sense. What gnosticism is this, and what physics? The fluttering patch I saw in my nursery window—silver and green and shape-shifting blue—is gone; a row of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the distant lawn. That humming oblong creature pale as light that stole along the walls of my room at night, stretching exhilaratingly around the corners, is gone, too, gone the night I ate of the bittersweet fruit, put two and two together and puckered forever my brain.Martin Buber tells this tale: â€Å"Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi Elimelekh that evenings he saw the angel who rolls away the light before the darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light. ‘Yes,’ said Rabbi Elimelekh, ‘in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don’t see these things anymore. †Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ Why didn’t someone hand those newly sighted people paints and brushes from the start, when they still didn’t know what anything was? Then maybe we all could see color-patches too, the world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam gave names.The scales would drop from my eyes; I’d see trees like men walking; I’d run down the road against all orders, hallooing and leaping. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 33 Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it. It is, as Ruskin says, â₠¬Å"not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen. † My eyes alone can’t solve analogy tests using figures, the ones which show, with increasing elaborations, a big square, then a small square in a big square, then a big triangle, and expect me to find a small triangle in a big triangle.I have to say the words, describe what I’m seeing. If Tinker Mountain erupted, I’d be likely to notice. But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present. It’s not that I’m observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio. When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head. Some ays when a mist covers the mountains, when the muskrats won’t show and the microscope’s mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall. But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter.When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer. 34 / Annie Dillard It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the mud dy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and flash! the sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn’t watch for it.It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over a dun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creek’s surface, very slow and steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time.Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fou ntain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone. When I see this way I see truly. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses. I am the man who watches the baseball game in silence in an empty stadium. I see the game purely; I’m abstracted and dazed. When it’s all over and the white-suited players lope off the green field to their shadowed dugouts, I leap to my feet; I cheer and cheer. But I can’t go out and try to see this way.I’ll fail, I’ll go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 35 discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod. The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover un iversally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness.Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. â€Å"Launch into the deep,† says Jacques Ellul, â€Å"and you shall see. † The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all.

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall Essay

â€Å"There’s an honest graft and, I’m an example of how it works†¦I’ve seen my opportunities and I took ‘em† (3). An excerpt that defines the confident and political leader: George Washington Plunkitt. As a brilliant and successful businessman Plunkitt managed to use his method of machine politics to win the heart and commitment of people and political power. In the novel Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, author William L. Riordon, Plunkitt’s political reporter who records the many lectures Plunkitt presented at Tammany Hall. The book emphasizes on Plunkitt’s advocacy for political control and the political machine that helped him gain wealth and a political seat in Tammany Hall. In novel, Plunkitt defends the political machine by explaining the difference between â€Å"honest graft† and â€Å"dishonest graft†. Many accused the political leaders of Tammany Hall of gaining wealth from graft. Plunkitt describes the difference between the two terms. He describes â€Å"dishonest graft† as â€Å"blackmailin’ gamblers, saloonkeepers, and disorderly people† (3). In other words, the corruption of gaining political or business power used from bribery. Plunkitt’s term for â€Å"honest graft† has to do with the example of purchasing and selling off land for business projects. For example, if the town begins discussing a specific piece of land to be used for a community park, Plunkitt would buy that piece of land, inflate the price, and sell the property to the project developer. Plunkitt finds his way of profiting â€Å"honest†; I call this taking advantage of ones political power. As an â€Å"honest† Irish- American Plunkitt knows how to take advantage of the game and he will continue to play it until sand turns into stone. With the ability to win over voter’s hearts and gain political support Plunkitt comfortably knows how to keep a seat in Tammany Hall. One of his, again, â€Å"honest† tactics, Plunkitt knows how to target specific types of voters. In the chapter â€Å"To Hold Your District†, Plunkett claims how to target the lower class people. He would start house fires so that the poor would not have any clothing or food. Then Plunkitt would act as a friend to the people giving them quarters for clothing and food to win the heart of the people. In other words, he was gaining a vote. Plunkitt would even hand out candy to children to promise to make sure their parents were voting for him in elections. As a corruption to society, Plunkitt knew how fake the political act and win people over with friendships. According to Plunkitt in order to become a politician in Tammany Hall one must know how to bluff. Everything was about winning a vote, whether it was taking someone to a baseba ll game or handing out candy to children. What ever it took. As a business and political man, Plunkitt knew the political game inside and out. With corruption, he managed to continue to remain in office for countless years. Even though Plunkitt’s grammar was inferior to a professors’ or college graduate, it had nothing to do with being a political powerhouse. A politician had to have common sense and know how to gain ones trust, even if it meant dishonesty. By selling himself and taking advantage of political and business opportunities with â€Å"honest† or â€Å"dishonest† graft, Plunkitt attentiveness always kept himself in front with wealth and politically.

Teachers and Faculty Carry Concealed Weapons on Campus Essay

Teachers and Faculty Carry Concealed Weapons on CampussImagine the feeling of safety as if it is invariably within our control or ability. people that are in ownership of a hidden arm are cognizant of the duty and the consequences of what can go on when utilizing a hidden arm. Safety of instructors. all other employees and pupils at a larning intuition can greatly better if the staff could be armed with hidden arms. Besides we must retrieve that all citizens of the United States have the right to transport and have a arm as guaranteed by the 2nd amendment of the fundamental law of the United States of America. Safety and security could be greatly improved with instructors and module transporting concealed arms on campus. hence. the instructors and module addition security ; the safety of the pupils can besides be achieved. The 2nd amendment to the fundamental law guarantees people the right to have and utilize a arm without intervention from the authorities ( Constitution ) . Although to transport a hidden arm requires extra permitting in all the provinces and districts of the United States. This is to assist everyone is safe and guarantee that a arm does non stop up in the incorrect custodies. This can dwell of a complete and through back land cheque. fingerprinting. and even mental wellness ratings may be required in some provinces. Some provinces besides require the applicant exhausted clip on the shot scope. schoolroom. and go to a basic huntsman instruction class. This includes the safety demands that a individual is expected to follow when in ownership of a arm and the proper manner to procure a arm when finished with its usage. After the certification procedure is completed this ensures the individuals has the ability to decently have and keep a hidden arm license. Most instructors and module accordingly would hold to take the clip to procure the proper certification so that they would be compliant with all the province and local Torahs to transport a hidden arm. Since. the instructors are traveling to hold more cognition of the pupils to cognize how to defuse a hostile or bad state of affairs. On the other manus the module being familiar with the campus layout would cognize how to procure the campus for the safety of everyone else on the campus. Even if this state of affairs merely happened one more clip and it saved the life of one individual instructors and module transporting a concealed arm could extinguish this state of affairs from of all time go oning at any learning establishment. Most instructors have already spent at least four old ages or more in school to learn and assist people larn in a safe and unafraid environment. Not to be in fright that a disturbed or disquieted pupil brings a arm to school and intends harm person. Besides teacher’s giving a class that a pupil thinks they should hold received a better class than they did. Then the pupils that carry arms to school to settle a mark with another pupil or even the spill over from an incident related to old pack activity. As a consequence of instructors and module transporting a concealed arm a 2nd idea would hold to be raised in the culprits mind cognizing they were traveling into a state of affairs where the resistance is besides transporting a hidden arm. Besides. let’s non bury that this is a right that we have and are non in any manner be forced into or even have to take part in. Similarly. school systems all over the United States are engaging a school resource officers and private security contractors to hold armed forces on campuses. This is known to diminish the opportunities of state of affairss intensifying with armed individuals on campuses. This would supply the added security that is needed to keep order and safety on our campuses. This will guarantee the pupils. instructors. module members are stay safe to foster their instruction and keep the unity of the acquisition establishments today and forever. However. the cost for the added constabulary or contracted security forces. and this will far transcend the cost of developing instructors or module forces to transport a hidden arm on campus ( Lewis ) . Therefore. allow us non bury that all of us will necessitate to utilize these establishments for schooling. proving. and larning a new occupation. It is safe to state that making these things in a safe environment is traveling to do that easier on anyone when preforming any undertaking required at larning establishments. Merely people that are willing and able to take part in this type of plan feel a demand for the added protection and security for our kids in school. instructors. and module. What would hold happened if a keeper noticed the culprit at Sandy Hook Elementary School and challenged him and he ne'er breeched the school. What if the gunslinger was challenged by the keeper before even acquiring inside the school. With a hidden arm on the module member this could hold been wholly avoided and ensuing in no loss of any lives. As a consequence of the presence of arms on campuses or anyplace we are ever traveling to hold the menace of force proving our security steps. As a consequence of instructors and module members transporting a concealed arm this will cut down the menace of force in our school guaranting that our kids safe and unafraid when we leave them at a learning establishment. Plants CitedLewis. Lyndsey. â€Å"Nevada Considers Arming Professors. † Chronicle of Higher Education 53. 44( 2007 ) : A20. 1/7. Print.Fundamental law of the United States of America. Bill of Rights the Second Amendment. † The rightto have and utilize a weapon† . World Wide Web. archives. gov/exhibts/charters/bill_of_rights. ( 1789 ) .

Marketing Paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Marketing Paper - Essay Example The products are procured from manufacturers at a discounted rate in comparison to price determined by manufacturers for offering those goods to local retailers. Contextually, it has been aimed to conduct a product launch in the emerging market of China with the motive of improving the international market exposure of made-in-America products and to enhance profitability of the club. The developing economy in China will assist the club in performing its business operations in an effective manner. The discussion will emphasize the recognition of media used for marketing American products in the market of China. Moreover, pricing strategies are required to be formulated for developing better competitiveness of the products in China and America. Furthermore, an analysis is also needed to be performed for understanding the reasons for penetrating the market of China. Reasons Behind Choosing the Market of China The market trends of China are developing in a drastic manner and there has be en an increased demand for good quality products due to the enlargement in the number of customers. China possesses the second largest economy worldwide and there is an upward increase in the buying behavior of people in China. Moreover, consumers of products and services in China consider value relating to quality, reliability and features to be the most important aspects among products or services which are to be acquired. Furthermore, consumers in China are considered to be flexible and conscious and with the development of technology, behavior of consumers in China has changed as they are becoming more inclined to obtain better innovative products or services. These changes in the buying pattern of consumers have facilitated China to be regarded as an emerging market worldwide. The changes in the market trend of China has also attracted investment from international organizations along with attracting multinational corporations (MNCs) for conducting business operations in this b ooming economy of China (The American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, 2012). The market size of the Chinese market has increased to a great extent owing to the continued growth in the economy and due to the increase in the number of consumers. The positive market conditions in China have attracted a lot of foreign investments and have drawn a few MNCs to operate in China, which has improved the growth and size of the market. The developed economy and favorable market conditions will assist national and international companies in performing business operations in a more effective manner and will also aid companies in enhancing profitability. All these conditions will assist AGW Club in conducting business operations in a more effective manner. Moreover, blooming economic conditions in China and the changing buying trend of consumers will facilitate the club to perform effectively and with profitability. All these favorable market conditions and trends are the factors responsible for selecting the market of China. SWOTT A SWOTT analysis has been performed for understanding the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and trends of China. The SWOTT analysis will also assist in recognizing the various aspects of China. Strengths The economic condition of China has been prospering over

Facial Fillers and Injectables Thesis Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Facial Fillers and Injectables - Thesis Example s, aging signs like crow’s feet, marionette lines, thinning lips and furrows between the brows can be removed in as less time as your lunch hour as well. Facial fillers require incredibly less time with no trauma of going through invasive surgery. Amusingly, doctors and plastic surgeons have started wondering that they may not be doing face-lifts at all in 20 years from now. Now, with the assistance of dermal fillers, you can restore youthful fullness to your face, enjoy lusciously plump lips and bade farewell to those fine wrinkles and facial creases. However, these dermal fillers cannot help a lot with extra sagging skin, but they can bring miraculous results in a short time with lesser pressure on your pocket than a face-lift surgery. Nevertheless, these injectables are not permanent and need to be maintained and repeated as recommended by the doctors. Your plastic surgeon will assess your need better and will recommend you one or a combination of treatments for your face to get hold of the desired results. Temporary treatments require your own body fat which is later injected to your face in order to avoid any risk of allergic reactions or rejection by the body. Using this technique, temporary treatments involve dermal filler like: The canvas of the dermal filler injectables have been made considerably extensive. After many researches and observations, many types of facial filler have come in the lead. These types of dermal fillers include: This is a filler surgeons use to fill and smooth moderate to severe wrinkles and folds. It is also useful to add volume to lift and contour the facial skin. Juvederm is basically made of hyaluronic acid which is a natural substance found in our body. Hyaluronic acid helps maintain body moisture and makes up much of the support structure of your skin. This substance again contains hyaluronic acid but is generally used for moderate facial lines and wrinkles. Combined with Botox, Restylane is also used to prolong the

Economy of Saudi Arabia and Canada Research Paper

Economy of Saudi Arabia and Canada - Research Paper Example In this case it is worth noting that these two countries are of the developed world and for that matter are in the first world countries. The various similarities that come into play are going to be focused on. The Saudi Arabian economy is one which is majorly based on its oil production capabilities. In this case it is worth noting that the country produces a significant amount of oil on the global market. For this reason, the revenues that are generated from the oil activities are very influential in the developments that are taking place in the Saudi Arabian economy. The other thing which is worth noting is that the Saudi government is an entity which has significant influence in the happenings of this economy. The revenue which is gotten from petroleum and its associated products accounts for close to 45 per cent of the total budget of the country. On the other hand, close to 40 per cent of the GDP in the country comes from the private sector. It is worth noting that the economy in the country is very encouraging to investments especially from the locals and also foreign investors. This significant developments in the financial well-being of the country has attracted quite a lot of for eign workers in the country. The figure at the moment stands at close to six million foreign workers. These are centered in the oil industries and also the private sector. Initially before the inception of the oil phenomenon, the Saudi economy was largely dependent on nomadic pastoralism. This was until the discovery of oil in the country. After the oil crisis that occurred in the year 1973, the country realized significant growth in its GDP. The GDP per capita in the 1970s went up by close to 2 per cent. As at the year 2009, the World Bank set Saudi Arabia as the strongest economy in Arab world. Saudi Arabia has the second largest oil reserves in the world. The figures that w4ere released by the government put this at close to 260 billion barrels of oil. This

Research Paper on literary canon and authors place in that canon

On literary canon and authors place in that canon - Research Paper Example His stories also illustrate the use of science fiction blended with horror and mysterious plots. Poe’s work became great source of inspiration and guidance for the coming writers in the genre of detective fiction and even the detective stories of today use the ideas first introduced in his detective fiction stories (Sova, p221). Poe occupies most prominent space in the detective fiction and even after several decades his work is still great source of inspiration for the writers of detective fiction genre. He paved the ways for ghosts and mysterious murdered in the American literature and illustrate the depiction of different fiction as well as scientific phenomenon in the stories. He introduced some detective characters to solve the mysteries of the stories. Before Poe the use of detective was not very common in the stories and there was no use of detectives for solving the mysteries (Ackroyd, p165). The history of detective and science fiction and detective fiction writing in America is marked with the names of several prominent and renowned fiction writer however, it is a fact admitted by the literary critics that the detective fiction writing was introduced and made popular mainly by two prominent writers including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Allan Poe that give space to ghosts and gore in their stories and pave the way of depiction of different factious objects in the stories. ... re in 1748, The rector of Veilbye by Steen Blicher in 1829, The murder of engine maker Rolfsen by Mautrits Hensen in 1839 and Das Fraulein von Scuderi by Hoffmann in 1819 (Bittner, p76) however, the literary critics and historians believe that detective fiction actually began in the English literature with the publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Allan Poe in which the first ever detective character was impressively introduced by Poe. In his later stories, Poe further refined the idea of detective and illustrated the construction of the story plots using the eccentric and brilliant detective character (Harold, p143). Later in 1843 another story The Mystery of Marie Roget was published followed by The Purloined Letter in 1844 in which Poe strengthened the idea of detective fiction and played vital role in the creation of detective fiction genre in English literature. Unlike the earlier mysterious stories Poe added the essence of fiction and emotions that made his work disti nct and his story formulas were widely followed by the detective fiction writers. The work of Poe became great source of inspiration for the writers in Unites States and all over the world. Several other science fiction writers like Jules Verne also adopted the styles and guidelines provided in Poe’s work and based their writing upon the writing style introduced by Poe (Edward Farah, p132). Poe was a versatile writer as he played important role in the evolution of several types of writing genre like detective stories, adventures, horror, science and fiction. His work in all of these genres successfully worked for his recognition as a pioneering writer of certain writing styles (Bittner, p76) however, his writing focusing upon science and detective fiction possess special place in all of

Technology religion and globalization Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Technology religion and globalization - Essay Example For example, no other species can survive both in the tropics and close to the poles and at the same time have the potential to survive in outer space (Herzfeld 117). The ability of people to survive entails the necessity of application of responsible interaction platforms to preserve other forms of life in the different environments. Responsibility is among the core values of human wellbeing as dictated by religion. However, technology enables exploitation and supports a growing human population, while marginalizing the rest of creation (Herzfeld 121). Therefore, in violating the relationships between man and nature, technology and globalization reduce human wellbeing. One of the effects of globalization is a growing disparity between the rich and the meager. The rich are getting wealthier while the meager are getting poorer. The disparity is fueled by the ability of the rich to exploit a bigger area due to globalization of world markets and growth of facilitating technology (Herzfeld 120). Though globalization opens up employment opportunities in the developing countries, though there is concern about the value of exploitation in the employment. For example, the employment opportunities benefit individuals as opposed to their societies. In addition, individual employment leads to low salaries because of a big pool of labor (Herzfeld 120). Therefore, in facilitating irresponsible dominions, and unequal relationships, globalization and technological advancement inhibit human wellbeing. One of the most important roles of a government is to regulate the application of technology to maintain a balance of the ethical and legal implications of the technology. For example, after the emergence of legal and ethical issues in stem cell research, the American government banned stem cell research in the country (Herzfeld 120). However, the lack of similar laws in other countries make such controls futile because the research firms simply relocate to

Based on recent event, discuss whether the stock markets are efficient Essay

Based on recent event, discuss whether the stock markets are efficient according to the Effficient Market Hypothesis - Essay Example This is based on the ideal of ‘a balancing act’, where markets are regarded as knowing the best means forward. However, skeptics of the above, view markets as being necessarily inefficient due to the various forms of risks involved. The reasoning behind the aforementioned theory is that a free and competitive market arena does place various pricing indices to their true basic values. Lo (2007), provides that the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH) does showcase the fact that market pricing indices do fully reflect all available data. This however does not eliminate critique, especially from behavioral economists and psychologists, who view it as being founded on assumptions which are counter-factual, especially with regard to human behavior/ rationality. A distinction is made between technical and fundamental analysis of stock pricing indices. The former, entails the utility of volume charts and geometric patterns in pricing, towards forecasting a given security’s future price fluctuation. The latter on its part, is concerned with the utility of both economic and accounting data, towards determining a given share’s fair valuation. Pegged on this assumption is the fact that as the existing market enhances overall efficiency, so does the price sequencing become completely unpredictable and random (Lo, 2007:17). As Shiller (2013) provides, though humanity continues being influenced by past global occurrences in the market arenas, this does not in any way remove the presence of existing market anomalies. The fact that the South American state of Colombia continues experiencing a real-estate bubble, which is ongoing, is representative of the volatility of the current market sector. With its real-estate pricing index rising by 69%, in terms of inflation-adjusted calculations, it provides a crucial insiders’ view of how market inefficiency continuously evolves. Rationality in individuals’ participation in various economic bubble s is educated by amongst others, the price increases as a result of the prevailing psychological contagion. It is this fundamental human aspect, which promotes a given mindset of justifiable price increases, thereby spurring fervent market activities. Due to the inherent nature of

Meaning of a Communication Major Research Paper

Meaning of a Communication Major - Research Paper Example However, not at all times must the receiver be aware of the sender’s plan to communicate at the time of communication. History of Communication as a Discipline While communication is part of every human interaction, no other discipline makes this behavior its unique focus. The Handbook of Rhetorical and Communication Theory by Gehrke, Pat (2009, p. 5) tells notes that communication departments deal with"†¦the pragmatics of human communication†. According to John Waite Bowers, former president of the National Communication Association, the discipline has both humanistic and social science roots. From the ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Augustine, we have one of the original liberal Arts. In recent times academics have added the methodologies of careful social science research to study communication behavior which use epistemology, perception and social organization theory (Wahl?Jorgensen, 2004). Communication is at the same time the oldest and the newest discipline. The Department of Rhetoric was replaced often by Department of Speech in college campuses just prior to World War I. After fifty years under that name; many departments started calling themselves â€Å"Speech Communication" and currently many are "Communication" or "Communication Studies" or other combination which tries to capture both the central focus of the discipline as well as its concerns. Scholars concentrate on understanding, analyzing, interpreting, critiquing and correlating principles which account for human communication experiences and behavior Benson (1985).Concerns range from logic and critical thinking to social and psycholinguistic variables. What Communication Studies Entails Essentially, a communication major focuses on the study of rhetoric and language based on Latin and Greek, and how these could be used for the benefit of society (Packer & Robertson, 2006). Like other arts including history, archeology, philosophy, linguisti cs and religion, ancient teachings form the foundation for communication major studies. A major in communication studies equips a student with in-depth knowledge of nature of human communication. Furthermore, the student gets to learn symbol systems of communication, media, communication environments and the effects of communication. Core to rhetoric are logos, pathos and ethos (Fink & McPhee, 2005). In the contemporary setting, majoring in communication teaches one to use appropriate medium to effectively present arguments and deliver messages. Today, for example, political speeches and messages presented on mass media are pregnant with rhetoric. Majoring in communication also helps academics learn how common languages evolve over time to such an extent that they define communities distinguishing them from the one another. Some of the subjects encountered in communication major include the following: Public Address - The study of speakers and speeches, including the historical and social context of platforms, campaigns and movements, and how current speakers can learn skills and applications to their own creation and production of messages. Oral Interpretation and Performance of Literature –The traditional part of the discipline that studies literature through performance. Based on critical analysis of written text, skilled verbal and non verbal presentations the

Commodity Paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Commodity Paper - Essay Example The Chinese used hand fans as coolant since time immemorial. In the 1800, American engineers made an attempt to create air conditioners as they had money and resources for doing this. The 20th century saw major development in this area majorly contributed by the discovery of electricity. Willis Carrier a 25 year old American invented the first model of air conditioning which was not designed for human comfort but was made to reduce humidity at his printing plant. It was made of mechanical unit that cooled air through circulating it in cooled water coils. He later added a centrifugal cooler to this unit greatly reducing its size. By 1930s, air conditioners were been used in offices, department and cars and this increased the workers productivity during the hot summer periods. This was a major development for Carrier Corporation which grew incredibly during these years. At some point the use of Air conditioning in the workplace was seen as an unnecessary luxury. However, evidence from several researches conducted showed that the use of air conditioning during the hot summers came with increased productivity. Organization therefore started getting the air conditioners for their offices in order to leap off benefits (Street et al 629). The air conditioners were not very common in homes with only 10% of the American homesteads using air conditioning. The rest of Europe and eastern countries slowly stated using the air conditioning mostly in the workplace. Outside work people still use the traditional methods of staying cool like dipping their underwear in iceboxes. Some of the popular air conditioning companies include Carrier Corps, Daikin Industries, LG and Samsung and lastly Haier, Midea and Gree. Carrier Corporation is the biggest layer in the market. This can be as a result of the fact that it was the pioneer in this industry and has therefore has the competitive advantage over the others that mushroomed after it was established. The company has established its operations in almost every part of the globe. It engages in the production of a wide varied range of products including indoor units, outdoor units, heaters of all kinds and HVAC equipment. It has several established brands such as the weathermaster, weathermaker, centurion, Byrant and Payne among others. Daikin Industries is based in Japan which is responsible for the creation of the Variable Refrigerator Flow HVAC systems. This is a special kind of system that is used to supply cooling or heating to a room depending on the demand. It can also provide cooling and heating simultaneously in different parts of a building. In order to get to its current position, the company has wielded to the wind of globalization. For instance in the year 2006, it acquired the OYL group company based in Malaysia. This expanded its scope and also increased the company’s brand giving it a stronghold in the market. Some of the brands associated with this company include the J& E hall and AAl (Am een, 72). Acquisition has made Daikin the second largest company in the production of air condition equipments after Carrier Corporation. There are other players in this industry in Japan and they include Sanyo, Toshiba, Mitsubishi and Panasonic. LG and Samsung are the third largest companies in this industry both based in South Korea. In a united effort to have a large market share in the globe,

Online Information system Essay Example for Free

Online Information system Essay Nowadays, technology has reached its highest level and is in the phase of developing more with the new innovations. Innovations that helps a lot of people to have a more convenient way to do enormous job to be done in a short period of time. Almost public high schools like Bernardo Lirio Memorial National High School (BLMNHS) are still handling their student record by means of using file document in a manual manner. The grades of the student are computed and recorded manually which it took time for the teachers to be done. Especially when a high school’s population increases annually, the ease of data handling needs more effort to taken care off. The manual saving of files in BLMNHS needs more file cabinets in order to save their school records. There are cases that some files are being lost and never been find or have been misplaced. There are also incidents that teachers are having mistakes in writing their student grades and records and they have to make a way to reedit the data and give them a lot of time and effort. As one of the first web-based of information system in computer technology in education, Online Student Information System (OLSIS) is made for educational establishment to manage student data. It is a database controlling student records, information, schedules, subjects, and grades. Information System (IS) helps users to become instructive, which means making it easy for them to organize, analyze, search and use old information to create new ones. As an order, it focuses on exploring the interface between Information Technology (IT) and Computer Science (CS). Computer Science (CS) focuses on information technology which is a software development. While Information Technology (IT) is involved with the manipulation, storage of data and information, and management of computer systems with companies, universities, and other organizations. The developers chose Bernardo Lirio Memorial National High School (BLMNHS) as their client because they need technology assistance. Since the populations of the students in BLMNHS are increasing yearly they decided to make this website to facilitate the keeping of records of each student. This project is an online student information system made for BLMNHS in order to manage their student data that should be handled for their school needs. The system helps especially those incoming first year students to inquire online. It also helps the faculty and the school administration in terms of handling of records. They can also upload their class and teacher schedules. The students can have their own account wherein they can view their grades, schedule and activities. Parents can also have an access of their child account. The faculty and the school administration can also have their own accounts for data handling. This online information system is created for schools that are in need of data handling. This project will benefit the school in terms of grade record handling for the teachers, accessible grade records for the student and their parents and other data that the school needed to be handled online. Project Context The developers decided to apply this web information system to BLMNHS because the purpose of the developers is to help them ease their job and to enhance the productivity of every person involved in school management. At present, the school management and it’s all procedures are done manually. It creates a lot of problems due to the wrong entries of adding data which causes duplication and redundancy of student record and grade setup. Since their data are stored in file cabinets, searching for data adds a lot of time for them to find it out. The developers proposed this system to maximize and minimize this kind of manual arrangement of data for the users to have a convenient way of handling their data. The system will solve the problem such as mistakes through proper checks and validation control methods in checking of student record, teacher’s record, grading reports. Purpose and Description The proposed system is an online school portal for BLMNHS that will help school teachers in handling their student’s data. It is a convenient way to access their data because it can be viewed over the internet. The confidentiality of their files is still maintained through the use of faculty no. and password in order to avoid from intruders. The privacy of the proposed system should also maintain for the school’s policies in the confidentiality of their school records. The students can also have an access in their school performances, school activities, health record and class schedules, these records can be viewed on their student profile. In this system, the parents have also their account wherein they can monitor their children’s records, like they can view their children’s grade, schedules, health record and their activities in school. The main purpose of the developed system is to give an ease of use in data handling in order to have a more efficient way of adding, deleting and editing of the data that should be managed and maintain. It woul help the client into a convenient way of accessing their data throughout the internet. This would benefit the students and teachers of Bernardo Lirio Memorial National High School (BLMNHS), the parents, other public high schools. The users should also have the knowledge of browsing the internet especially the said website. The developers used a web designing software in order to build an interface and functionalities for the future users of the system. A Server is also used to view the created website over the internet. For data handling we use database software that could handle and manage a large amount of data. Objectives The main objective of the said project is to develop a web information system that will computerize and organize different modules in Bernardo Lirio Memorial National High School (BLMNHS). Specifically it aims to: 1. Identify the present student information system used by BLMNHS in terms of: 1. 1 facilities and resources 1. 2 technology utilization 2. Provide a better service for the students and faculty of BLMNHS with the following features: 2. 1 Submission of grades 2. 2 Viewing of Schedules and Subjects 3. Determine the level of acceptance of the developed web services among faculty and students of Bernardo Lirio Memorial National High School relative to: 3. 1 user interface 3. 2 compatibility functionality in terms of browser 3. 3 contents components 4. Perform beta testing on the developed web services. Scope and Limitation The developers would like to improve and build up the web information system for BLMNHS. The study will focus on the transformation of manual Online Student Information System of BLMNHS. The aim of the project is to concentrate on data handling of records of each student like grades, subjects, schedules, and medical record. Each student’s parent would also have their own account in which they could access their child’s grade records and schedules. Students are not able to edit or manipulate their records within the website, instead, the website administrator are the only one who can edit this data. Parents should register first their accounts via their child’s designated LRN, but they can create their own username and password in order to secure their accounts. Faculty could also have their own account wherein they are the one’s who record each of their student’s school performances, in terms of grades and class schedules. They could also upload their files but this data are only seen by their co-faculty members and also by the website administrator. The website administrator accesses all data that the website should maintain. It is also responsible for user requests wherever they could have problems in their profile. The entrance examination will not be covered by the study for the reason that the examination should not be taken online due to the possibilities that it may have leakage during the examination. Definition of Terms These terminologies were gathered by the researcher for better and clearer understanding about the study. It also sets as reference for each system’s functionalities. Backend. Backend is everything that happens before it gets to your browser. A backend can be very simple or very complicated. [1] It is hidden by a user and can only access by the administrator of the system. It is where the data are being stored and operated. Client-server. It describes the relationship between two computer programs in which one program, the client, makes a service request from another program, the server, which fulfills the request It serves as the administrator’s task to manipulate and control the system through peer-to-peer or network. [7] It is a correlation of program that fulfills request and delivers the response, and vice versa that creates a one line process. Database server. Database server is the term used to refer to the back-end system of a database application using client/server architecture. The back-end, sometimes called a database server, performs tasks such as data analysis, storage, data manipulation, archiving, and other non-user specific tasks. [4] It is a kind of internet service that provides databases for websites; it acts as the backend of the system. Data Flow Diagram (DFD). A data flow diagram (DFD) shows how data moves through an information system but does not show pogram logic or processing steps. [2] It also illustrates the data flow of each function of the system. It also shows on how each data has been processed and the corresponding end users of this system. Domain name. Provides the ability to refer to IP devices using names instead of just numerical IP addresses. Allows machines to resolve these names into their corresponding IP addresses. [2] It also serves as an identification name for the website. Frontend. It is the part of the web that you can see and interact with. The Frontend usually consists of two parts: the design and frontend development. [1] It also serves as the user interface of the system. It is accessed by the user. IP (Internet Protocol). A packet-switching technology that is deisgned to get packets from point A to B in whatever way is most effective, without the user necessarily having any ability to know what route will be taken. [3] It acts as the address number of each data from a computer that has been sent to another computer. It also sets as identification for each computer in the internet. Text Editor. A text editor is a computer program that lets a user enter, change, store, and usually print text It is a programming tool used for editing plain text files. [8] It is used mostly for webpage designing and integration. Web host. Hosting (also known as Web site hosting, Web hosting, and Webhosting) is the business of housing, serving, and maintaining files for one or more Web sites. [9] It is a kind of Internet service that allows orgranizations to make their website accessible via World Wide Web. CHAPTER 2 REVIEW OF RELATED SYSTEMS In this chapter presents the related studies that have been done over the past years. This includes the foreign studies, local studies and the technical background which includes the software that will be used throughout the process of creating the study. Related Systems The Degif developed the system â€Å"School Management System† for KokebeTsebah Secondary School†. It has been shown that the system effectively registers students along with parental information, easily retrieves information about a student and generates the required reports such as transcript, report card and timetable. In addition to generating a feasible master timetable it produces a timetable for each teacher. Furthermore it has been shown that the web application of the system helps attendance recording by the homeroom teacher and parents can view the status of their children using the Internet or Intranet of the school. Most educators like the systems if they work smoothly and help students learn, according to teachers and teacher-union representatives. Brian Lewis, chief executive of the International Society for Technology in Education, a Eugene, Ore. , professional group, says the systems can foster a strong home-school connection and allow busy parents to be involved—and let them step in early if a child is struggling. Bill Erneste, a math teacher for 20 years, says one of the biggest advantages these systems have over paper grade books is that parents and teachers are communicating without even a phone call. At Park Hill High School in Kansas City, Mo. , where he teaches, he likes posting links to instructional materials that students and families can use at home. Plus, teachers say online reporting makes it easier to collaborate and share information. Other teachers, however, regard posting grades and assignments as an administrative burden, especially for inexperienced educators who often need to spend more time planning lessons and managing their classrooms. Some parents misuse the systems by trying to micromanage their childrens work or overreacting to minor missteps, creating extra work for teachers. Also, problems arise when schools use multiple programs that dont share data, requiring teachers to enter data more than once. [10] The developers found out that there are related systems that exist outside the country so it is a proof that â€Å"Online Student Information System for Bernardo Lirio Memorial National High School† is convenient to use and lastly, it can improve the services of the school to its students. The Student Information system Via-Wapsite was developed to provide a system in wap-based information retrieval system of student. The system has also provided an alternative, efficient and reliable system that provides an easier way to access student information system and verify grades through mobile phones. And also the developers want to provide a system that has a key access and menu-driven interface for students and also for the administrator. [11] On the other study the developers developed the online submission of grades of the faculty to the registrar and the online viewing of student’s grades. It will diminish the hassles in walking right through the registrar office. The system developed only in authorized persons. [12] The Online Student Information System for F. L Vargas College Tuguegarao City cited that maintaining student’s records manually is a very difficult task and time consuming. The said school are still using filling cabinet to store their files, there are some incident that some of the files are lost. [13] The Student Information System of Southgate Institute of Malvar is specifically about the arrangement of different modules into one whole school system. One of the objectives of this study is to remove the deficiencies of current system and build up new computerized system, it shall be faster and will able to produce results of various queries. [14] The developers found out that the system has its potential to provide greater conveniences and accessibility to the students since student can access information despite of their location and time at their convenience. All these systems are related in the sense that systems aimed to lessen the problems encountered by the students, faculty and other respondent during enrollment and school days. The preceding review shows the transition from a manual system into a computerized system. As similar applications for the enlistment process have not been implemented yet in Bernardo Lirio Memorial National High School the results of this study may provide additional information on the subject and may become an effective tool to push the computerization of many transactions done in school. The study shows that the proposed system is feasible and had a chance to be implemented. The proposed system was developed and concentrated only in high school. The difference of the proposed system from other system that has been done is that it is made exclusively for a certain High School. Nowadays the existing school online websites services are made only for tertiary levels. The developers want to bring the benefits of technology to high schools in which students can have their own accounts and also for their parents. Teachers, administration and staff have their own accounts also for their school monitoring activities, updates and grade records. The system is comprised of a newer networking technology technique, thus a faster and real time online student information system. Technical Background In building a website there are different softwares that can be used in which it should includes programming language, database and server. Here are the programs that are used in order to build the Online Student Information System of Bernardo Lirio Memorial National High School. The PHP Hypertext Preprocessor allows web developers to create dynamic content that interacts with databases. (Mike Chapple, 2008). The proponent used this language for the ease of making website. The language was one of the most recommended in terms of making websites. PHP is also great for creating database-driven Web sites. Most web hosting providers support PHP for use by their clients. It is originally designed to create dynamic web pages. PHP is very fast and lightweight. MySQL It is an open source RDBMS package for back end tool for managing the database as this allows users to manage the database very efficiently and controls data redundancy and inconsistency. It allows enforcing various data integrity constraints on the data being entered into the tables. Database can be accessed using GUI provided by the system (Angela Bradley, 2006). MySQL serve as the database of the system. The proponents believe that MySQL was the most reliable to managing database because most of the web developer used it. Database can be accessed using GUI provided by the system. MySQL helps the proponents to accumulate the appropriate records in the database. It helps to handle the whole data and information in the certain school. Apache Server is a web server software program notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web. Apache was the first viable alternative to the Netscape Communications Corporation web server (currently named Oracle iPlanet Web Server). Typically Apache is run on a Unix-like operating system, and was developed for use on Linux. Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation. The application is available for a wide variety of operating systems, including UNIX, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, Novell NetWare, OS X, Microsoft Windows, OS/2, TPF, and ComStation. Released under the Apache License, Apache is open-source software. (Robert McCool, February 2013) Apache Server was the most popular server software on the Web so that the researcher decided to use this server. This server serves as the temporary server for our websites. It enables a computer to host one or more websites that can be accessed over the Internet using a Web browser. It supports PHP so the developers use this as server. Apache is popular when it comes in Web Hosting because it is open source and free to use. CHAPTER III DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY This chapter presents the methodological study for creating the proposed system. It includes the methodologies, requirement specification, user interfaces, software interfaces, performance requirements, system overview, and system architecture. System Analysis and Design The Online Student Information system of Bernardo Lirio Memorial National High School access the student and faculty school information. It also improves the user’s accessibility in their information, and convenience in data handling and manipulation. System Design The following diagrams are the system design followed by the developers in order to achieve the necessary data that should be processed on the system. Figure 1 shows the general flow of the data accommodated within the system. It is compose of four entities wherein it sets as the user of the system, in each entity there are several operations that should be undergone. These processes are the functions of the system to imply on the actual operation of the system. Figure 1. Context Flow Diagram Figure 2 shows the registration process of a user to the IS wherein the system admin generates the newly registered user’s to its database. The users can have their own account. Figure 2. DFD of User Registration Figure 3 illustrates the data flow diagram of the grading system of BLMNHS that can handled by the system. The grades of the student to be computed by their teachers are from their assignments and their examinations. The grade that has been computed can be view by the student’s profile and also to their parent’s profile. Figure 3. DFD of Grading System Figure 4 shows the data flow on handling the student’s health record. The BLMNHS’s P. E. teacher is the one who is in charge of handling the health record of the students. Figure 4. DFD of Student Health Record Figure 5 shows the flow of submitting of schedule. The admin will submit the schedules in both teachers and student. And the teachers and students can view their schedules on the web, the same with the parents they can view the schedule of their children. Figure 5. DFD of Schedule System Implementation The Online Student Information System for BLMNHS was deployed over the web through a web server. The system’s main feature was implemented only for BLMNHS student, parents and faculty. The developers used web hosting for their system to be accessed via online by the students. The administrator is the one who maintain and update the system. The users of the site should have internet access in order to explore the said system. Project Concepts To meet the needs of the proponents in data handling specially the developers sets an objective in order to achieve a goal in creating the system. Figure 10 shows the Homepage of the Web Page. The users can see the Announcements, history, and admission policies of the school. Figure 10. Homepage Figure 11 shows the login page in order to have security on their profiles. Their student’s Information should be confidential and to avoid from intruders. For newly registered users they have to fill up some important details to fulfill the information that are needed by the school. The information that entered by the users can remain confidential generated by the system administrator. Figure 11. Log in Page Figure 12 shows the Student’s profile wherein they can view their grade record, Class schedule, school activities uploaded by their teachers; they can also submit their assignment. Their health record and status can also view on their profile. This data are manipulated by their P. E. teachers who are in charge in their health maintainability. The student account record can be view by the system. Figure 12. Student Profile Figure 13 shows the teachers’ profile that has the authority to view their student profile. They are also the one who upload schedules, school activities, student grades and class standings. Teachers can also compute their student’s grade on the website and sent it throughout the designated profile. Figure 13. Teacher’s Profile Figure 14 shows the Parent’s portal that have an access to their child’s class standing, grades, schedule, and health record. They can view the school activies of the school of their child. They can also send a message to the system admin. Figure 14. Parent’s Portal Figure 15 shows Rapid Application Development (RAD) whereby, it is use mostly by information systems and website to describe the process of building the system. The first phase is to define the problems of the school that we are using for our study. The developers also identify the possible solutions for the problem and how to help them in the most convenient way of data handling. The second phase is Analyze wherein the developers analyze the software to be use to create the system. The developers will also analyze the flow of the system throughout the operation of the system. The next phase is Design developers will now formulate design for the data flow of the system and also the design of the user interface that the user will view on the proposed system. This will help the users to easily understand and explore the system on the rest of the system operation. Develop is the fourth phase to follow by the developers, here the system’s design, operation and processes are being develop in order to improve the system’s performance. Here the user interface of the system and the functions should be developed to have a more efficient system to be use. It will also identify the possible risk that system will undergo. The next phase is to test the system if it is functional and can be used by the actual users. It will also test the website if it is effective and the other functions are usable. The last phase is support, as the system has been test and has no possible malfunction that has been identified it is now ready for the users to use throughout the net. The maintainability of the system should be operated in order to have a well created system. It will limit the system future risk within the operation. Development Model Figure 15. Rapid Application Development Development Approach The developers are referring to use the top-down approach. In this approach the developers has the overview of the system wherein it focuses on the formulation of the system. Top-down approach breaks down some parts of the system into categories which is essential for the developers. The IS are consisting of different divisions on different function that will be used by the users of the system. Each division should be identified to know the functionalities of each system for the appropriate users. Software Development Tools The developer prefered using open source software tools, since it is more accessible and free than using proprietary softwares. For front end software tools, we use html and css for the website interfaces. For the special website functionalities we use javascript. In order to code these softwares we use a text editor for the entire coding operation of the system. For the backend of the system, we use PHP for website conditions and also functionalities, in order to implement database within the website we use MySql. At first the developers worked offline in order to test the website’s effectivity with the use of XAMPP. For the live implementation of the website, the developers prefer to buy domain name, web host, and the database server. For the users who can access the website faster than using free web hosting sites that might commits problems in accessing the website. The developers also use Filezilla to import the files and links that has been use for the website within the net. Project Teams and their Responsibilities Each team members actively participated in every task all throughout with their own responsibilities in developing a web system. Some specified partitions of project task are as follows: Irish Opena is responsible in designing and development of the project. Angelica Montero is responsible for congregation of information, data and other related facts that would help in the development of the study. Lester Cueva is responsible for organizing group meetings, places, times, dates, communication requirements, etc Budget Cost Management Plan Table 9 shows the expense that has been used for the system. These are suggested to be bought in order to have an easier and accessible website for the user. Domain name is an identification string for the website so that it would be easier to be search by the web. Web host is a web service wherein it helps the website to be accessed by the users. Database server is a computer program that provides database services for the website that allows handling the data within the web. These preferences are bought to make a website implemented throughout the World Wide Web. Table 9 Budget Cost Verification, Validation and Testing Plans The system will test its functionalities with the use of server to test if it is actually works throughout the internet. As this test has been done, it will now evaluated by the faculty, parents and students of Bernardo Lirio Memorial National High school. Questionnaire. Preparation and construction of the questionnaire were done by reviewing concepts related from books, journals, theses and electronic resources. The responses provided by the respondents were given weights of 0 to 5 with 0 as lowest to 5 as highest rate. Corresponding verbal descriptions were also proided in different areas. The following scale was used to interpret and analyse the results: RateVerbal Interpretations 5 Exemplary 4Good 3Satisfactory 2 Needs Improvement 1 Poor 0 Unaacceptable/Absent, N/A A total of (40) respondent evaluated the system having number (5) as the highest possible rating and number (0) as the lowest. The scale used has the corresponding values such as 5 for exemplary, 4 for good, 3 for satisfactory, 2 for needs improvement, 1 for poor and 0 for unacceptable. The total points of the evaluation has corresponding verbal equivalent rating the system’s performace for the user. The respondents in the conducted survey were the faculty and students in Bernardo Lirio Memorial National High School (BLMNHS) and parents for they are the target user of the proposed system. In testing the system, the proponents used the content testing which involves checking of the human-interface of the web. In our system we check errors in font types, screen layout, colors, graphic resolutions and other features that may affect the end-user experience. Next is the white- box testing which is said to be very applicable in testing web architecture web. This type of testing is used to find navigational and structural structures in the system. Lastly, testing the end-user environment or the browser compatibility testing web [3] (Glenford J. Myres, Art of Software Testing. Second Edition. John Wiley Sons Inc, New Jersey, 2004). In this part of testing, the proponents focused in configuring the compatibility of the browser, operating system, and the programming language used in the system. Table 10 present’s respondents profile based on gender where in female got the highest frequency of 24 and having a percentage of 56% while male having a percentage of 44% and got the lowest frequency of 16. Table 10 Respondents Profile in terms of Gender Gender Frequency Percentage Male 16 44% Female 24 56% Total 40 100% CHAPTER IV RESULTS AND DISCUSSION This chapter will discuss the result and analysis of the development and testing of the program in tabulated format. Screenshots of the system are also included in this chapter. Observation 1. The proponents have collected the desirable information from Bernardo Lirio Memorial National High School (BLMNHS) which was used in developing the system suited in the need of the said school. The proponents noticed that the school had a problem in their record management method. They manually handled the files and information they have and sometimes they are having hard time in accessing it. Figure 16 shows the homepage of the website. It is divided into 4 major portals, the Student, Parent, Faculty, and Admin. Figure 16. Homepage To solve the problem, the proponents had designed and developed the system that can be used to manage and record the information of the students. Hereby, the developers identify the present student information system used by Bernardo Lirio Memorial National High School in terms of: 1. 1 facilities and resources As the system has been tested and evaluated the developers observed that the facility of staff should be increased in order to better serve the student population. It also decreases the time required to access and deliver student records. 1. 2 technology utilization By means of the new technology, the said institution offers more convenient transactions contrasting in their manual system beforehand. 2. Provide a better service for the students and faculty of BLMNHS with the following features: 2. 1 Submission of grades Submission of grades is more convenient than the manual system of grades. Figure 17 the subject to be graded. The faculty can choose the subject that they would like to upload the grade of their students. As they choose their designated subjects they can now search their students name a