Childhood Awakening (Visions from “An American Childhood” by Annie Dillard) (2000)

Chorus (SATB divisi) – 12 mins.

Audio

Score (Free Download)

Program Note

Childhood Awakening was commissioned by Voces Novae to be part of a program of music touching on the experience of childhood.

Texts from “An American Childhood” by Annie Dillard

From page 11:
Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along…

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years.
I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
I woke at intervals until the intervals of waking tipped the scales,
and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking,
and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away
I would be awake continuously and never slip back,
and never be free of myself again.

Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along…

From pages 16 and 17:
… In the kitchen I watched the unselfconscious trees through the screen door, until the trees’ autumn branches like fins waved away the silence. I forgot myself, and sank into a dim and watery oblivion.

A car passed. Its rush and whine jolted me from my blankness. The sound faded again and I faded again down into my hushed brain until the icebox motor kicked on and prodded me awake. “You are living,” the icebox motor said, …or the dripping faucet said, or any of the hundred other noisy things that only children can’t stop hearing. Cars started, leaves rubbed, trucks’ brakes whistled, sparrows peeped. Whenever it rained, the rain spattered, dripped, and ran, for the entire length of the shower, for the entire length of days-long rains, until we children were almost insane from hearing it rain because we couldn’t stop hearing it rain. …The silence, like all silences, was made poignant and distinct by its sounds.

What a marvel it was that the day so often introduced itself with a firm footfall nearby. What a marvel it was that so many times a day the world, like a church bell, reminded me to recall and contemplate the durable fact that I was here, and had awakened once more to find myself set down in a going world.

In the living room the mail slot clicked open and envelopes clattered down. In the back room …the steam iron thumped the muffled ironing board and hissed. The walls squeaked, the pipes knocked, the screen door trembled, the furnace banged, and the radiators clanged. This was the fall the loud trucks went by. I sat mindless and eternal on the kitchen floor, stony of head and solemn, playing with my fingers. Time streamed in full flood beside me on the kitchen floor; time roared raging beside me down its swollen banks; and when I woke I was so startled I fell in.

Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along…

from “An American Childhood.” Copyright © 1987 by Annie Dillard. Permission granted.