Annie Dillard died Tuesday at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts. She was 81. What she left behind is not easy to sum up in an obituary’s usual terms – career, honours, survivors. Rather, as the writer’s writer that she was, Dillard has to be read.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the place to start, because it is the place she started. Nothing else quite explains her mind. Dillard was in her twenties, living alone near a creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains, keeping journals of what she saw. And what she saw was ordinary: muskrats, mockingbirds, a praying mantis laying eggs, a frog. But she watched with a patience that borders on the monastic. Dillard once spent weeks trying to catch a muskrat unaware, learning to stand so still by the bank that the animal would forget she was there.
“Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe,” she wrote about her creative process. “This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”
What makes the book strange, and what makes it great, is that this naturalist’s patience sits right next to a theologian’s hunger. Dillard watches a giant water bug drain a living frog and does not look away, and then a few pages later she ask what kind of creator makes a world built that way. She had studied Thoreau closely enough to write her master’s thesis on Walden, and the debt shows, but where Thoreau builds an argument, Dillard builds a vision, and the visions in this book do not resolve into comfort. There is a famous passage in which she describes walking along the creek, thinking of nothing, and seeing a cedar tree that seems to catch fire with light, every cell of it burning without being consumed. She does not explain it away. She just tells you what it cost her to see it, and what it cost her to lose it again.
That refusal to look away from either the violence or the wonder is the engine of the whole book, and nowhere is it clearer than in the passage where she turns, almost mid-sentence, from observation to command. Enough diddling around with itsy-bitsy lives, she says, in her own words, before she tells the reader plainly:
“I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.”
It is a remarkable piece of writing advice, or life advice, and it is entirely earned by the three hundred pages that come before it. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Dillard was 28.
Fourteen years later she wrote The Writing Life, a much smaller book about a much narrower subject, the actual daily mechanics of making sentences, and it turns out to be just as strange and just as good. She describes revision as demolition, tearing down a structurally unsound house rather than patching the cracks. She compares the writer to a miner with a pick, a wood splitter with an axe, a surgeon, even a Seminole wrestling an alligator, because to her the work was physical before it was anything else. And she is ruthless about the temptation to hold something back for later, to save your best material for a bigger occasion. Her answer to that temptation is one line, and it is the whole ethic of the book in a single breath:
“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time…give it, give it all, give it now.”
Writers quote that line because it is true and because it is frightening. It asks you to trust that more will come, which is the only thing a writer ever really has to trust.
Then there is For the Time Being, published in 1999, which is the least tidy of her major books and maybe the most ambitious. It moves between a maternity ward and the deserts of China. It sits for a while with palaeontologists who spend their careers counting grains of sand. It turns to the Kabbalah of the sixteenth century mystic Isaac Luria. It turns too to the Baal Shem Tov, the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidic Judaism, a rabbi remembered for turning cartwheels in the street out of sheer religious joy. And it keeps returning to the plain, hard facts that started the inquiry in the first place: birth defects, natural disaster, the suffering that theology exists to explain and never quite can. The book does not move in a straight line. It circles back again and again through the same handful of subjects, birth, sand, China, evil, now. It turns like a wheel. She sits with the scale of things the way she once sat with the muskrat: 1,198,500,000 people alive in China at the time she was writing, and the demand that you multiply your own particular, irreplaceable self by that number and try to hold both truths at once. She is reading Aquinas and the Baal Shem Tov in the same paragraph and finding that neither one settles the question of why a good God allows what he allows. She does not resolve it. She was never in the business of resolving things. What she offers instead is a sentence that holds the whole paradox without flinching from either side of it:
“There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.”
She wrote other books, essays in Teaching a Stone to Talk, the theological reckoning of Holy the Firm, a historical novel called The Living set on Puget Sound, and a memoir of her Pittsburgh childhood. On her childhood, she wrote: “Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.”
Annie Dillard taught a generation of readers and writers that attention is a moral act, not just a literary technique. The muskrat, the water bug, the cedar tree, the gaps, they were never really about nature. They were about what it costs to look, and what you find when you finally do.
