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More
from and about
Annie Dillard
(biographical info at bottom of page) |
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You
do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you
want to
look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary.
But the stars neither require nor demand it. |
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Thomas Merton wrote,
“there is always a temptation to diddle around in the
contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is
always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle
around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for
itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so
apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where
the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this
grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of
your days on the edge of rage.
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.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read
books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die.
We are here to witness the creation and to
abet it.
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The answer
must be, I think, that beauty and grace are
performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least
we can do is try to be there.
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There
is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to
come
by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The
life of
sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The
life of
the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage
sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent
reading -- that is a good life.
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Caring passionately about something isn't
against nature,
and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do. |
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly
becomes lost to you. |
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These
are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in
the present. |
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I
would like to learn, or remember, how to live. |
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Concerning
trees and leaves... there's a real power here. It is amazing
that
trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped
lobes, as if I were
to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud and flower.
Every year
a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent
of its living
parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred
and fifty feet an
hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water
every day. A
big elm in a single season might make as many as six million
leaves, wholly
intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one. A
tree stands there,
accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly
it seethes,
it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them
out in a green,
fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in
the tulip tree
pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.
Annie Dillard
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The soul may
ask God for anything, and never fail. |
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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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