“How we spend our day is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.”

– Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard spent her days plumbing the depths of life, observing the intricacies of the natural world and arranging what she found into profoundly beautiful sentence. She will be missed by many.

Dillard was a pioneer in creative writing, one of those rare individuals who weaved poetry into prose in ways that dazzled her readers with a dizzying sense of awe and wonder. She is best known for her 1974 masterpiece, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek a moving chronicle of a year she spent living, observing, and searching for spiritual meaning alongside Tinker Creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Rather than a standard plot, the book records her meticulous, intense observations of muskrats, pond water, monarch butterfly in migration, witnessing the beauty and terrors of nature at every turn. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won Dillard the 1975 Pulitzer Prize and catapulted her to fame. She was only 30.

The book also set the tone for her later works such as her essay collection Teaching a Stone to Talk, and full-length works Holy the Firm and For the Time Being. They all attend closely to the natural world, expressed with a spiritual eye and a poet’s idiom. She has been compared to Henry David Thoreau, whom Dillard cited as a major influence in her writings. But Dillard pushed the lyrical idiom much further, blurring the boundary between prose and poetry to the delight of many though not all readers of creative nonfiction. Consider these excerpts from Pilgrim:

“.. but at the creek I slow down, center down, empty… I find a balance and repose. I retreat – not inside myself, but outside myself, so that I am a tissue of senses. Whatever I see is plenty, abundance. I am the skin of water the wind plays over; I am petal, feather, stone.”

Dillard has her share of critics who find her writing too mystical and belaboring. Others find her preoccupations with lyricism distracting. I am squarely on her side, though. Nature is so profusely complex that words really aren’t sufficient to do it justice. Poetry is the closest thing to words that can hopefully capture how we feel about the intricacies of the natural world and our place in it. To that end, Dillard makes an important contribution – heightening our sense of awe and wonder at nature’s beauty and terrors. Here’s another passage, from her Harper’s essay “The Death of a Moth,” where she describes the insect’s final moments after being drawn to a candle flame and got stuck in the wax:

“She burned for two hours without changing, without swaying or kneeling – only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God.”

In The Writing Life, Dillard describes how her approach to writing a book is similar to writing poetry, “so intense and accented, and the world it described so charged with meaning.” that the idea of going further exhausted her. To help her write, she draws on the language sounds of her favorite poets, including the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud who was known to combine prose with poetry in a way that Dillard does. American poet Wallace Stevens was another major influence for her. While working on difficult passages, she said she would repeat a single line of Wallace Stevens’ poetry “for hours, like a song” to maintain a specific sonic and emotional register. It comes as no surprise that the heightened register of these poems made its way into her writing.

Dillard’s encounters with the divine through the natural world are also palpable in many of her writings though it is not an overt kind of spirituality. She never viewed herself as a theologian, more like a curious sojourner wrestling with the presence of God manifest in the mysteries of nature. In this, I think she can be compared with other writers such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver. Her work has in turn influenced countless contemporary nature writers, including Terry Tempest Williams, Robert Macfarlane, Margaret Renkl, and others.

Words of Annie Dillard

“What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.”

~ From Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“I never merited this grace, that when I face upstream I scent the virgin breath of mountains, I feel a spray of mist on my cheeks and lips, I hear a ceaseless splash and susurrus, a sound of water not merely poured smoothly down air to fill a steady pool, but tumbling live about, over, under, around, between, through an intricate speckling of rock… I never merited this grace, that when I face upstream I see light on the water careening towards me, inevitably, freely down a graded series of terraces like the balanced winged platforms on an infinite, inexhaustible font. “Ho, if you are thirsty, come down to the water; ho, if you are hungry, come and sit and eat. This is the present, at last… This is the now, this flickering broken light, this air that the wind of the future presses down my throat, pumping me buoyant and giddy with praise.”

~ From Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God’s brooding over the face of the waters, it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to ‘World.’ Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.

~ From Teaching a Stone to Talk

Lessons about Living a Fulfilled Life

“I don’t think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular, but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel’s: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.”

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“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death – where you’re going no matter how you live – cannot you part.”

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“Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of art. Do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength.”

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