An American Childhood

In this final section, Dillard is writing at her desk in her home at her present adult age; she is about 42 years old. She once again ties the landscape of the physical world to the landscape of her inner world, carrying this motif throughout the memoir. She states that the only important act in life is awakening to the world around you. In this epilogue, the author directly speaks to the reader: “The setting of our urgent lives is an intricate maze whose blind corridors we learn one by one—village street, ocean vessel, forested slope—without remembering how or where they connect in space” (247). United in our experience of the world around us, Dillard remarks that the value in our lives lies in our recognition of the ways in which we are consciously connected to the world. Through the natural and social world we share, we become connected to one another.

Dillard experiences the world in a series of awakenings: “And still I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive” (250). Her awareness is not constant.