My heroes are leaving. The giants are leaving us. It’s hard not to feel this way. It’s hard not to take it personally, even though death is the way of the world and the fleetingness of mortality is what makes life sweet (in some ways). First Dolly, then Wendell and now Annie Dillard. There is less beautiful racket and peaceful repose in this world today than there was just a few weeks ago.
Maybe it was the Pittsburgh of it all, but Annie Dillard made me feel less alone. My friend, poet Jessica Manack, went to Hollins College (like Dillard, many decades later) and said on the day of her death, “Who would I even have been if her words hadn’t set me seeking in those mountains.”
And I wonder the same thing. Dillard gave us all permission to think big thoughts–what does it mean to be alive? Or awake? And what do the rivers think about all of that? Or the squirrels? Or cedar waxwings?
I rushed to my copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for the thousandth time, to re-read some of my favorite passages of her life on Virginia’s Blue Ridge. She wrote that it was a place where she made herself scarce. She wrote that it was an anchor which steadied her at disquieting moments. It was a good place to think.
Annie Dillard, born in April, 1945 in Point Breeze, Pittsburgh and educated in Appalachian Virginia, was a writer’s writer. Dillard, like her own home on Tinker Creek, was an anchor for me and her words steadied me in the undertow of trying to find my way in the world, a journey I started not far from Dillard’s own starting place. Her writing inspired me and, if I’m being honest, intimidated me, too. Despite the dizzying heights of her prose, it does, yes, hold me here, on planet earth, left to wonder at the beauty of the world if we could all just make ourselves scarce, just a little bit more often.
She wrote about nature and awe and thinking. She wrote about the powerful transformations which are possible in this life. I don’t think we talk about wonder enough, but it was evident in all of Dillard’s writing–her wonderment in our ability to feel wonder at the world around us.
In her memoir, An American Childhood, first published in 1987, she wrote about learning to play football as a girl–she was a Pittsburgh kid after all–and described it this way: “But if you flung yourself wholeheartedly at the back of his knees–if you gathered and joined body and soul and pointed them diving fearlessly–then you likely wouldn’t get hurt, and you’d stop the ball.”
Dillard likewise flung herself wholeheartedly to the task of writing, fearlessly joining body and soul.
I think of Dillard’s 1974 masterwork, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, more often than is probably healthy. I think of her cat (“an old fighting tom”) who would come through the window at night and scratch her while kneading her, as cats do. I think of her waking from dreams, half awake, wondering where the blood came from. You move with Dillard through the world as a naturalist and a mystic, in a sort of ecstasy. The tadpoles. The sunlight slicing through the tree canopy like so many medieval swords. She is fascinated with even the lowest of the low; even the water skeeters and puddle flies marvel her. She is enraptured.
She was alive in this intersection where the divide between human endeavor and the natural world is blurred and gentle. She was as much a part of the landscape as the frogs and the plankton and those water skeeters. Where did she end and the world begin? Dillard, herself, didn’t know sometimes.
I think of her house there, at Tinker Creek. She wrote of living there in the shadow of the mountains–Tinker and Brushy, McAfee’s Knob and Dead Man–and I quote her often, even in casual conversation, saying, “The mountains are home.”
Mind you, these are the Appalachian mountains–mountains so old, our minds cannot conceive of time in this way. How old is 480 million years? Can you even begin to wrap your arms around such a time span? Have you ever even stopped to try and tackle that? I’ll bet Dillard did, though. I’ll bet she turned that phrase, “480 million years old” over and over in her mind, trying to feel it like one might feel for the perfect pebble to skip on still waters, looking for a way into understanding.
This most ancient of places suited a writer like Dillard whose work is a record of her tossing aside the fleeting and the trendy in search of the timeless. I feel her yearning to find something as old as these mountains themselves. It is beautiful to behold and leaves me in a state of rapture, for reading Dillard feels like a moment of spiritual ecstasy.
At the same time, Dillard, like all of us, was a mere mortal, made of blood and bone and sinew, one who famously fueled her writing of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with Vantage cigarettes and chocolate milk in the Hollins College Library. How wonderfully human and accessible that makes her feel to me.
Annie Dillard was a writer in love with reading, a voracious reader who loved reading as much as she loved the natural world. Throughout all her writing, she broke some of the rules many writers rely on and specifically, she used longer words where short ones might do, but she was such a master, she could break rules and leave you in wonder at the beauty.
In her essay “Total Eclipse,” which was included in The Best American Essays of the Century, she wrote that, “All those things for which we have no words are lost.” This, for me, is Dillard’s love of writing laid bare, vulnerable, there on the page for all to behold.
This was also the advice she gave to other writers. In The Writing Life, she told writers to write as though we were on our deathbeds, but also to write for readers who were likewise dying, who might spend their last moments of life reading:
“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened, and its deepest mysteries probed? … Why are we reading if not in the hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the possibility of meaning, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?”
I think of this passage so often as I am drawn, over and over and over, into the world of writers so they can heighten life, thrill and delight me with nothing more than their powers of observation, imagination and willingness to fling themselves forward on the page. I hope that my last minutes of life will find me with a book clutched in my hands, maybe one written by a writer as yet unknown to me but who will astonish me anew.
Despite the precision and rigor, there is a wildness to Dillard’s writing. There are times when her observations are as untamed as these woods she so loved, yet the exactitude of her craft remains. There isn’t a word or phrase out of place. You can smell the mossiness of the wet woodland, but still you are experiencing exquisitely mediated art. And yet, wildness isn’t always pretty or easy. There is horror in nature and her writing faces things which can be hard to see, for we witness change and mortality here.
“The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die” she wrote in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
This giant has left us, as giants must do. But this giant left us a treasure map–the world is there for us if we care for it, from the humble water skeeter to the mighty black bear. It will, like her home at Tinker Creek, hold us if we let it.
She would tell us, I believe, that the work is the thing. The writing is the reward. It is the gift. In An American Childhood she showed us the tenderness she had for toil: “Effort alone I loved. Some days I would have been happy to push a pole around a threshing floor like an ox, for the pleasure of moving the heavy stone and watching my knees rise in turn.”
Now, after her death, I will always picture her like this: working. At a laptop or with a legal pad and pen in hand. But maybe I’ll picture her pushing a pole like an ox. Or beating grain on the floor of a thresher house with her bare hands. Maybe going from farmstead to farmstead, as traveling threshermen, with antique equipment. This is the work of writing–to separate the wheat from the chaff with sweat and awe and wonder. None of us can do it like Dillard did, but we should rush to our writing desks to write. Write because you have to since, and I don’t think that I’m overstating this, our lives do depend on it. Be like Annie Dillard–awake in the world, seeking, stumbling, in joy.
