The story starts back in 1950, when I was five.
Oh, the great humming silence of the empty neighborhoods in those days, the neighborhoods abandoned everywhere across continental America—the city residential areas, the new “suburbs,” the towns and villages on the peopled highways, the cities, towns, and villages on the rivers, the shores, in the Rocky and Appalachian mountains, the piedmont, the dells, the bayous, the hills, the Great Basin, the Great Valley, the Great Plains—oh, the silence!
The opening lines of the memoir reveal much to the reader. This is a story that, for many, will not be familiar in any way; it is a story of a different time in America. The second paragraph is also information in announcing that this is not to be a simple story of facts recorded and transmitted. The metaphorical introduction of the book’s second sentence gives way to an almost stream-of-consciousness conceptualization that seems to be pouring forth from the author more like conversation than written autobiography. The opening to the book assertively announces (or, for some, warns) of everything that is to follow.
"I am awake."
This quote and variations and iterations recur several times throughout the course of the narrative, creating a thematic motif. Awakening is the author’s preferred metaphor for coming to another level of understanding; for that moment when one realizes that something has changed forever and they are now able to comprehend the world in a different way.
How long does it take to draw a baseball mitt? As much time as you care to give it. Not an infinite amount of time, but more time than you first imagined. For many days, so long as you want to keep drawing that mitt, and studying that mitt, there will always be a new and finer layer of distinctions to draw out and lay in. Your attention discovers—seems thereby to pro- duce—an array of interesting features in any object, like a lamp.
The book is a first-person memoir; a remembrance of that childhood in America from the perspective of the adult at a distant point in the future. At times, however, the narrator engages a technique in which of entering into the memory and situating it from the perspective of the present. To facilitate this technique, the point of view shifts from “I” to “you” with an accompany shift in verb tense further intensify the effect that the memory of the past is taking place in real time in the here and now.
I could be connected to the outer world by reason, if I chose, or I could yield to what amounted to a narrative fiction, to a tale of terror whispered to me by the blood in my ears, a show in light projected on the room’s blue walls. As time passed, I learned to amuse myself in bed in the darkened room by entering the fiction deliberately and replacing it by reason deliberately.
Early on the author engages in a flight of fancy about the nature of “the interior life.” The life of the mind is the one that that author inhabits for the most part during her childhood. It is a remembrance of childhood that eschews for the most part the conventional roadmap of hitting certain markers of maturity; the roadmap charts a path through intellectual development. Hence, the constant referencing to becoming awake.
