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Writer
and poet Annie Dillard was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. She attended Hollins College in Virginia, and in
addition to authoring several books, has been a columnist for the
Wilderness Society; has had her work appear in many magazines
including The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The Christian
Science Monitor, and
Cosmopolitan; has received fellowship grants from the John
Simon
Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; and
has received various awards including the Washington Governor's
Award, the Connecticut Governor's Award, and the New York Press
Club Award.
"I am no scientist," she says of herself. "I
am a wanderer with a
background in theology and a penchant for quirky facts."
She adds, "As
a thinker I keep discovering that beauty itself is as much a fact,
and a
mystery...I consider nature's facts -- its beautiful and grotesque
forms
and events -- in terms of the import to thought and their impetus
to the
spirit. In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with
violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in
death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant,
spendthrift energy."
Environmentalists have compared Dillard to Thoreau, Dickinson, and
Emerson. Edward Abbey wrote this about Teaching a Stone
to Talk: "This little book is haloed and informed
throughout by Dillard's distinctive
passion and intensity, a sort of intellectual radiance that
reminds me
of both Thoreau and Emily Dickinson." Loren Eiseley,
reviewing Tickets
for a Prayer Wheel, says this about her: "She loves the
country below.
Like Emerson, she sees the virulence in nature as well as the
beauty
that entrances her. Annie Dillard is a poet." |
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I would like to
learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn
how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, 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 senses and the
dignity of living without bias or motive.
Annie Dillard
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