You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, and then — and only then -it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings.
It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. Also from The Writing Life. Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work.
I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—and only then—it is handed to you. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite?
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. To use a pair of terms that Dillard introduces in a later book, she is not a pantheist as he was but a panentheist. God, panentheism says, is not coextensive with, identical to, the physical world, the world of nature.
He is a being that transcends it even as he dwells within it. Get rid of nature, for the pantheist, and you get rid of God. Get rid of nature, for the panentheist, and you see him all the clearer.
That, I think, is why it has to be a creek for Dillard, not a pond. The world abides and always will. Creation is continuous, and the heavens will be rolled up as a scroll.
She watches the water, but waits for the flame. Thoreau runs his narrative year from spring to spring—nature filling up, emptying, and starting to fill up again. Dillard runs her own from winter to winter; the emphasis is on the emptiness. In an afterword written for the 25th-anniversary edition, she reveals a deeper, two-part structure. Philosophers on the via positiva assert that God… possesses all positive attributes.
The first half, culminating with the summer solstice, is the plenitude; the second the reduction. A final chapter recapitulates the movement. Its epigraph—employed again in The Abundance —comes from the Koran. Accumulate to spend. Get rid of nature, to see the God who dwells in nature. It sounds paradoxical, and it is. The via negativa , with its purity and stringency, clearly proved to be the more congenial path. From Tinker Creek, beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains in the lushness of the Roanoke Valley, she decamped, the year after publishing Pilgrim , for a place considerably more austere: Lummi Island, in the northern reaches of Puget Sound.
The description comes from Holy the Firm , the work she proceeded to write there, a book that is to Pilgrim what Lummi Island is to Tinker Creek. It throws out the crayfish and copperheads, the frogs, the bugs, the twigs, the scientific lore, all meanderings of thought and ambulation. The text runs 65 pages, short ones, and the prose seems pressed out drop by drop. Dillard later said the book took 14 months to write, full-time, which works out to something like 25 words a day.
There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time. She knows that all you can really do is frame the question, which she does by telling us about a child named Julie Norwich.
Julie is a local girl, 7 years old. Holy the Firm presents itself as the record of three days on the island. On the second, Julie goes down in a plane crash—her father, flying the craft, is unharmed—and has her face burnt off.
I doubt that Julie Norwich ever existed. Her name is an echo of Julian of Norwich, the medieval anchoress and mystic, whom Dillard had alluded to in Pilgrim. Her story is a riddle, like his. Why do such things happen?
For they happen all the time and everywhere around us. One day she sees a deer tied up in a village. In language flayed to rawness she describes its suffering:. I got another taste of her work with The Abundance. And, recently, I sat down with The Writing Life , having inherited it, along with a boxed collection of Dillard, from a great aunt. She was poignant in the most basic ways, by which I mean she somehow captured the root or the simplicity of lofty subjects. She distills her thoughts like a fine, earthy whisky, making the result both easy to go down but complex enough to swish around the tongue before swallowing.
Even as I stack these words on top of each other, I can see her fingerprints all over the paragraphs above. While reading The Writing Life , I took a new approach to deep reading in hopes that it would better burn the book into my brain. My copy is now dotted with sticky flags designed to look like adorable animals a few bears and almost all of the frogs.
And I kept running notes on a separate piece of paper which, when I reshelve the book in my collection, I plan to fold and tuck between the endpapers for easy access in the future. But what good does marking the best, juiciest, most ah-ha parts of the book do me, really?
Sharing, after all, is caring. And I care for you, dear reader. Really, that just means they are my favorite Annie Dillard quotes of the title, but I imagine there may be some overlap in what I and other readers liked or found especially striking.
You hammer against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. Some of the walls are bearing walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is.
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