When Annie Dillard died at age 81 last week, I immediately thought of my father, who kept a copy of her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek on our family bookshelf. My dad, a science teacher, saw Annie Dillard as a nature writer in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau. When I eventually read the book, it felt to me like travel writing — so much so that I wrote a one-page tribute to Dillard (alongside such American icons as Thoreau, John Muir, and Walt Whitman) in my debut book, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel.
Yet Dillard resisted calling herself a nature writer, and, like Thoreau, she never embraced far-flung travel. Her writing — quirky, insightful, unique to itself — celebrated the miracle of existence, and evoked and the rich (and at times terrifying) complexity of life on earth. Dillard’s worldview, was, at its essence, about paying attention — an ever more essential virtue in an age of algorithmic distractions.
Dillard’s writing was always rooted in a spiritual consciousness, which meant that, for her, attention to life was inseparable from a memento mori awareness of death. “You see the creatures die, and you know you will die,” she wrote in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “And one day, it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you’re gone.” Even her advice to other writers was rooted in an awareness of mortality. “Write as if you were dying,” she noted in her 1989 book The Writing Life. “What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
In the wake of Dillard’s own death, one can’t help but think of her own rumination from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (published when she was just 28 years old), on the way that mortality itself can’t be teased apart from the joy of having lived. “I think that the dying pray at the last not ‘please,’ but ‘thank you,’” she wrote, “as a guest thanks his host at the door.”
Here are nine Annie Dillard quotes that have stuck with me:
On the ubiquity of beauty
Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
—from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
On the heady task on being alive
Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don’t fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat’s stem cuts the crest of the present.
—from For the Time Being (1999)
On the uses of simplicity
It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you can cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.
—from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
On living a good life
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.
—from The Writing Life (1989)
On embracing the present moment
But time is one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We keep waking from a dream we can’t recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees. …You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hook and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.
—from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
On the importance of schedules
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker and stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order — willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
—from The Writing Life (1989)
On the way we mistake ordinary times for extraordinary ones
These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. …Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn. We have no chance of being here when the sun burns out. There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. …Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy — probably a necessary lie — that these are crucial times, and we are in them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?
—from For the Time Being (1999)
On the mystery of death and suffering
What I have been after all along is not an explanation but a picture. This is the way the world is, altar and cup, lit by the fire from a star that has only begun to die. My rage and shock at the pain and death of individuals of my kind is the old, old mystery, as old as man but forever fresh, and completely unanswerable.
—from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
On the importance of paying attention to life
Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. We should amass half-dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.
—from The Writing Life (1989)
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