She won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction at 28. She died last week at 81.
Ten years ago, Sam Anderson gave a compelling description of Annie Dillard’s prize-winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in The New York Times Magazine:
“’Pilgrim’” unleashed upon the world Dillard’s radical style: prose right on the border of poetry, dense with dazzling effects — strong metaphors, heavy rhythms, bold verbs, sudden parables, outlandish facts harvested from the darkest corners of the library.”
In his next sentence, Anderson nailed her goal:
“to crowbar surprise, sentence by sentence, into all the tiny gaps of our ordinary experience.” [i]
I offer an example. The following paragraph is marked with a curled, purple, sticky note in my hardback copy of Pilgrim:
“If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagancies, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”
Eudora Welty, in 1974, reviewed Pilgrim for The New York Times. She titled her review “Meditation on Seeing.” She gave the book mixed praise, clearly stating that at times, she did not know what the author was talking about.
“The author is given to changing style or shifting moods with disconcerting frequency and abruptness,” Welty said. “You might be reading letters home from camp, where the moment before you might have thought you were deep in the Book of Leviticus.”
My response?
YES.
Dillard’s juxtapositions feel, in one hand, prickly and shocking. That’s the poetry of it. Simultaneously, in the other hand, on the other side of our connected body, we welcome their weight and sense their prosaic truth. It’s as if we say to ourselves, “Come to think of it, I have been awed by something extravagant or beautiful or violent or wonderful in the world around me; I just haven’t sat with it that long.”
When you read Dillard, you do more than sit with it, sipping. You steep.
Here’s a paragraph from Holy the Firm, Dillard’s novella-length meditation on life and death, beauty and pain, and where we fit in it all.
“I salt my breakfast eggs. All day long I feel created. I can see the blown dust on the skin on the back of my hand, the tiny trapezoids of chipped clay, moistened and breathed alive. There are some created sheep in the pasture below me, sheep set down here precisely, just touching their blue shadows hoof to hoof on the grass. Created gulls pock the air, rip great curved seams in the settled air: I greet my created meal, amazed.”
That’s the way Dillard experienced the world: breakfast connects to Genesis connects to God connects to grass connects to hooves connects to shadows connects to gulls connects to flight connects to feeding. I experience the world this way, too. Don’t we all, in what Martin Laird calls “the inner chaos going on in our heads, like some wild cocktail party of which we find ourselves the embarrassed host”?[ii] We leap from landscapes to love to laundry to layer cakes to longing.
Dillard tuned in, acutely, to what she was seeing and thinking. She also read theology, philosophy, and fiction—widely. And she wrote outward from there—deeply. She blurred prose and poetry, present and past, and perspective. She zoomed in and out rapidly, yanking us along for the ride. Living in nature, looking for God, she found fragments of his essence everywhere.
“Hoopla! All that I see arches, and light arches around it. The air churns out forces and lashes the marveling land. A hundred times through the fields and along the deep roads I’ve cried Holy. I see a hundred insects moving across the air, rising and falling. Chipped notes of birdsong descend from the trees, tuneful and broken; the notes pile about me like leaves. Why do these molded clouds make themselves overhead innocently changing, trailing their flat blue shadows up and down everything, and passing, and gone? Ladies and gentlemen! You are given insects, and birdsong, and a replenishing series of clouds. The air is buoyant and wholly transparent, scoured by grasses. The earth struck through it is noisome, lighted, and salt. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? ‘Whom shall I send,’ heard the first Isaiah, ‘and who will go for us?’ And poor Isaiah, who happened to be standing there—and there was no one else—burst out, ‘Here am I; send me.’”
Eudora Welty wanted Dillard’s writing to be perhaps a tad more controlled, to wander a little less explosively. But Dillard saw explosions all around her. Her writing is an alarm clock with a snooze button you can’t permanently shut off; you only tame it for a few sentences before it sounds off again. It sings, Hear me! Wake up! See the moths. Climb the trees. Eat the salted eggs. Live.
Welty concludes her review by giving Dillard grace: “But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you – and other people – any trouble.”
Amen.
Annie Dillard showed me that I wasn’t alone in seeing life as a miracle and nothing as mundane. For wondering why about everything. For lighting up with joy at the intricacy of a flower and trembling in fear at the power in a leaf.
“What’s going on here?”[iii] Dillard asked throughout her books. Her wild and well-chosen words point us to clues.
[i] Anderson, Sam. “Annie Dillard’s Impossible Pages: Three early and unpublished works by the author of ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.’” The New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2016.
[ii] Laird, Martin. Into the Silent Land. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
[iii] Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
