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.
This is the opening line of the book and the introduction of the cat is used to set up a symbolic image which will carry throughout the rest of the text. The narrator had been in the habit of sleeping beneath the window and the cat being a cat would naturally take his leave come the night to do those mysterious things that cats do the dark. The mystery would become more focused, though certainty as many mornings could play out the same way: the narrator waking to discover that the cat had come back home to nuzzle, thereby leaving her body covered in bloody paw prints. The bloodstains lead to a theological pondering over whether that blood was of purification or sacrifice. The existence of the duality and the mystery therein plays out through the book as nature is revealed to be beautiful and ugly, life-giving and life-taking, refreshing and terrifying.
Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator's exuberance that grew such a tangle, and the grotesques and horrors bloom from that same free growth, that intricate scramble and twine up and down the conditions of time.
These lines bring the chapter titled “Intricacies” to an end. It is a chapter that veers off from the others just a bit as it becomes less directly observational and more contemplative. From the origins of a goldfish bowl, the narrator draws conclusions about the design of the universe and how with each increasing step in evolution, the design becomes more intricate. Such an intricacy almost certain must be proof of some kind of directed design. This design also touches upon the duality theme as evolution is capable of creating intricate designs both monstrous and beautiful.
What if I fell in a forest? Would a tree hear?
Any narrative in which the author purposely takes a position of alienation from society—even if only mostly symbolically—if there is a true commitment to the point of isolation, then the effects of that condition are bound to appear. Even the most committed loner—the one who actually goes through with become a recluse or the very extremity of being a hermit—is bound to feel the effects of loneliness and the natural yearning for some kind of human interaction. Of course, when you add to the isolation and alienation the fact that you are living in the woods where even normal relative conditions of mail and buying supplies and such guarantees some sort of interaction, all it takes is one wrong step and suddenly what seems like an adventure based on Thoreau moves a little north geographically and becomes an adventure based on Stephen King. At least the narrator has a sense of humor about it, though.
The electron is a muskrat; it cannot be perfectly stalked. And nature is a fan dancer born with a fan; you can wrestle her down, throw her on the stage and grapple with her for the fan with all your might, bit it will never quit her grip. She comes that way; the fan is attached.
This quote perfectly illustrates how Dillard’s text is anything but a tree-hugging bible for those Thoreau-wannabes. The natural world around her in the woods is merely the starting point of a series of essays that take off into flights of imagination touching upon disciplines beyond the obvious. Just as her pet goldfish leads her to conclude with metaphorical precision that evolution is the agency of the universe’s intricate design, so it is the primary theoretical foundation upon which the fame of physicist Werner Heisenberg—yes, that Heisenberg—breaks that calls upon her the epiphany that her experience cannot accurately be judged an objective examination of the wonders of nature taking place all around, but only an examination of an examination. Nature is far too indeterminate to arrive at what can be fairly be termed a final conclusion.
