Annie Dillard was born the day Hitler died, eighteen days after FDR died, as if in her the whole history and destiny of America was reincarnated, triumphant, superpowered. She welcomed this synecdoche, played the all-American writer willingly—this was one of her magic tricks, the universalization of one white woman’s mind. Like most sleights of hand, she did this by manipulating your attention. It is possible there has never been a greater, a gentler, a more gripping English-language handler of the world’s most refractory material: your senses, your sentience. She wrote like the weasel who “bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.”
She clung to me, too; try as I might, Annie Dillard is unexorcisable. Reading her essays taught me how to write, and writing like Annie Dillard taught me how to see. Her weasel teeth still scar my writing flexors, shape my every phrase. But this is beside the point. Truly, what does it matter how much you love water, or a lion, or the moon? Dillard only became a nature writer because critics didn’t know what else to call this itinerant theologian, seeking shrapnel of the Absolute in the last wild pockets of a wasteland she dared not name. She went silent in 2007, leaving the rest of us languageless, grasping, exasperated, to merely describe our monstriferous times. When she died last week, the earth did not groan, the wind did not keen, the orchids did not wilt, and it will be many decades before we know what demons were born.
She came from Pittsburgh, a daughter of the steel industry’s upper-middle management. Her father and his colleagues gambled on suicides they could see from their skyscraper corner office; her modernist mom collected Yoruba sculptures. Tomboy Annie spent her American Childhood (1987) scouring the alleys for ancient pennies, throwing snowballs at passing Buicks, and summering in luxury on Lake Erie. Private school, Presbyterian church, cotillion. She whooped with her playmates like cowboys and Indians, scandalizing the country club pool. Of course her autobiographical writings are horribly awkward about her family’s black servants, plagued by the crimped circumlocutions of the enlightened boss class. The closest Carnegie Library was just past the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks, in Homewood, a neighborhood rapidly collecting black Pittsburghers displaced by racist urban renewal. One afternoon, age 10, she ran into the chauffeur at the library on his day off. “He spied me, picked me up—books and all—swung me as he always did, and introduced Mother and me to his friends. Later, as we were climbing the long stone steps to the library’s door, Mother said, ‘That’s what I mean by good manners.’”
Is this what it takes, or is this what it costs, to become America’s most prestigious and miraculous writer of sentences? Beyond a certain elevated threshold, the mind curls in on itself, goes rococo. At the Homewood library, Dillard discovered her destiny in the shelves of natural history: The Field Book of Ponds and Streams bequeathed her a lifelong love of lists of technical nouns, which, when enumerated in the right rhythm, depart from the domain of science, take off for somewhere more spellbinding: “daphniae, planaria, water pennies, stonefly larvae, dragonfly nymphs, salamander larvae, tadpoles, snakes, and turtles, all of which one could carry home.” So began her quest to isolate, encapsulate, and magnify the things of the world. Slowly, she stopped roughhousing and started collecting rocks, studying amoebas under a microscope, catching beetles in a jar. When she couldn’t distill the bewildering variety of reality into a private language, she sought patterns—and limits beyond which knowledge could never go. In the Field Guide To Rocks and Minerals, “crystals grew inside rock like arithmetical flowers. They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones—maybe only the stones—understood.”
Her great themes were timeless, the stuff of the ancients’ ancients: perception, eternity, travel, the problem of evil. She repudiated Aristotle, denied the primordial split between myth and natural philosophy: Anything could, and would, be likened to everything, in the service of the sentence. Staring out a window: “I drew the cows, for they were made interestingly; they hung in catenary curves from their skeletons, like two-man tents.” Periscoping around the obstetrics ward: “Knit hats the size of teacups keep sliding up their wet heads.” Watching archaeologists unearth the terracotta soldiers: “The hot dust smelled like bone, or pie.” So intensely focused on the microtextures of sensation, she knew no diachrony, causality, contradiction: time moves through an endless succession of unique here-and-nows. Annie Dillard was not a materialist—probably because her sentences were transcendent. “Fine prose in this sense is like Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry, or Milton’s epic poetry, or even Homer’s. If you scratch an event, you get an idea.” How insipid, I think sometimes, wanting to shake her out of her solipsism, harangue her with a rant about the metabolic rift. Nothing could be more important, I think later, when I can’t sleep, after five continuous days on the computer, than learning how to notice, really notice, a fern.
Some of the sentences, I admit after the death of the American attention span, are ponderous, precious, purple as a peacock. Her affectations annoy me. On Planet Dillard, for example, the smallest possible unit of time is apparently a twinkling. Watching a baby drain a bottle: “She sucks it down in a twinkling.” As a child, a new fact “would turn my life around in a twinkling.” Between a writer and her book, “this tender relationship can change in a twinkling.” She loved the verb to bollix: For post-Bohr physicists, “the use of instruments and the very fact of an observer seem to bollix the observations.” Children with congenital deformities “signal, or rather express in skin and bones, their bollixed brains.” Still, merely copying others lifts me a quarter inch off of my chair. Probably I’m just jealous. She really made me see that muskrat, those minnows, that stuntplane I didn’t see. “The plane looped the loop, seeming to arch its back like a gymnast; it stalled, dropped and spun out of it climbing; it spiraled and knifed west on one side’s wings and back east on another; it turned cartwheels, which must be physically impossible; it played with its own line like a cat with yarn.”
In a twinkling, I am bollixed. Reality is re-enchanted. How many other writers can truly be said to have invented a form? Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) launched a thousand books of interlinked essays—including her own, her weirdest, patchworkiest book, For The Time Being (1999). In it, she travels to China, Ecuador, Israel; she weaves these journeys in and out of the lives of the orientalist paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin and the early antimodern Hasidic mystic the Baal Shem Tov. She counts the clouds in a gale; she calculates the static electricity of a sandstorm; she freewheelingly cites Thomas Merton, Martin Buber, the Mahabharata, Confucius, Juan Rulfo, Elizabeth Bishop. Idiosyncratically, indiscriminately, but with a singularly stringent rigor, she approaches, and pushes ever closer to, the razor’s edge of the absolute present. Liberals love to claim Dillard as the 20th-century Thoreau, but I think actually the most instructive comparison is to Rachel Carson: forty years Dillard’s senior, another daughter of Western Pennsylvania’s managerial class, but grown up before deindustrialization destroyed that lifeworld, leaving behind a tattered reality for Dillard to cobble back together out of mismatched fragments. Silent Spring was published in Carson’s 50s, after a scrupulous scientific career cataloguing whelks or whatever for the US Bureau of Fisheries. By contrast, Dillard was precocious: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek came out when she was 28 (are you fucking kidding me). It belongs to no institution, subscribes to no discipline. Nothing mediates mind and universe but a thin scrim of language—puckering, tautening, shimmering under the shearing force, stretching until threadbare, and sometimes, way more often than any writer in a just world ought to be allotted, achieving a perfect transparency you can plunge through, into the infinite.
Delulu and Guitarist remark somewhere that there has only ever been one class: the bourgeoisie, the coding and decoding class, who have spent the past five hundred years producing so prolifically and projecting so narcissistically that they really did warp the rest of the world into their image. Similarly, Sam Kriss suggested at the innocent dawn of this terrible decade, there has only ever been one generation: “The boomers, the fucking unkillable zombie boomers.” No wonder Annie Dillard, bourgeois boomer supreme, won the Pulitzer; no wonder even my self-absorbed students, who don’t know how to read, like her work. For fifty years, every freshman writer, every personal essay, every New Yorker annal, every work of, ugh, “creative nonfiction,” has been forged in the crucible of Annie Dillard, poured into a mold in the shape of Annie Dillard. She redefined writing as a thing you could do to commune with your nondenominational Maker in public; she redefined nature as a place you could go to be alive, alone.
Writing, wrote Dillard, “is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.” This vision of freedom is also an image of solitude, self-management: autonomy in the German sense of holding yourself subject to a law you alone devised. The paradox is that you are most free when you void your will, become a channel for something greater, something alien, something else. “A weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.” “The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.” Make no mistake: if literature is an enormous engine for generating sentences, one of its critical carburetors or solenoids died last week. You can order a million knockoffs on Temu, but they won’t last as long or run as reliably as she did. The boomers are finally dying, and taking America with them; the starter motor is sputtering and nothing will be the same.
Because now there is no nature, and robots do our writing. Today, Tinker Creek wends through the suburbs of Roanoke, Virginia, past a Walmart and a Pepsi plant. KO Boomer, I think cruelly, reading Dillard’s travels through Israel, her obtuse refusal to perceive the occupation, her turn instead toward cosmic equivocations about human being:
One-fifth of us are Muslims. One-fifth of us live in China. Almost one-tenth of us live in range of an active or temporarily dormant volcano. . . . At five to a car, almost all the Inuit in the world could park at LAX. Similarly, if you propped up or stacked four bodies to a car, you could fit into the airport parking lot all the corpses from the firestorm bombing of Tokyo in March, 1945, or all the world’s dead from two atomic bombs, or the corpses of Londoners who died in the plague, the corpses of Burundians killed in civil war since 1993. . . . Through the jammed lanes of Jerusalem’s Old City came a Palestinian pushing a wheelbarrow and shouting, “Yo hablo Español! Yo hablo Español!”
Here she is being the stuntplane, looping the loop, skywriting from a vantage so high all of history has collapsed into a dance of dust motes. Here, she has finally found God—and appointed herself His accountant, stacking strangers into awful piles, tallying liquid time. The perspective is beautiful—and useless. It emanates from, and returns taciturnly to, somewhere beyond utility. Maybe this has always been the purpose of literature, and maybe it is good that we are forgetting how to read. But at least the angel of history could identify individuals in the wreckage.
Dillard could, too, when she wanted. That stuntplane that so astonished her was flown by Dave Rahm, a kind of man you don’t meet anymore, a geology professor and aerobatics ace, whom she later finagled a way to fly with. They sideswiped Mount Baker. She asked him if they could do a barrel roll. Sure, he shrugged, and suddenly “I could see the chrome sea twirling over Rahm’s head like a baton, and the dark islands sliding down the skies like rain.” Later, on one of those windswept islands where she was writing alone in a cabin, she heard word of his death in a crash while performing for the King of Jordan. “It is hard to imagine a deeper penetration into the universe than Rahm’s last dive in his plane,” Dillard concludes The Writing Life (1989). She got back to work. Another visitor called, asked why on earth she would spend her precious days trying to summarize Whitehead. And for once, she didn’t know what to say. It was her nature. She was free as a weasel to do nothing else.
I rallied and mustered and said that the idea was to learn things; that you learn a thing and then as a matter of course you learn the next thing, and the next thing . . . As I spoke he nodded precisely in the way that one nods at the utterances of the deranged. “. . . And then,” I finished brightly, “you die!”
