Thoughts: Annie Dillard & Intricacy

Wrote Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on the open ocean. What else is he supposed to be thinking about? Fortunately, like a sailor, I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable amounts of time to what I can see, and trying to piece it together...I've gathered statistics feverishly: The average temperature of our planet is 57o farenheit. Of the 29% of all land that is above water, over a third is given over to grazing...These statistics, and all the various facts about subatomic particles, quanta, neutrinos, and so forth, constitute in effect the infrared and ultraviolet light at either end of the spectrum.

 This brilliant observation about the world we live in is incomplete. Along with these invisible macro and micro influences we have familial ones. Our ancestors remain in a macro influence at an undetected end of the spectrum of a person's life and I don't know what the other end of the spectrum would be, the minutia of human relationships. Perhaps it is a person's subconsciousness.

Maybe this quote can be adapted for use in the book.