What Is It That Dillard Never Wants to Witness Again a Field of Silence

T he abundance, a selection from the piece of work of one of the smashing, original voices in recent American messages, might just as easily be called The Absence. It speaks of absence—for nature's profusion, in Annie Dillard, is everywhere the signage of the hidden god she seeks—and information technology also marks an absence: hers. Dillard's first book appeared in 1974. Over the following 25 years, she published 10 more original volumes, including two that have achieved the status of modern classics, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a latter-day Walden, and The Writing Life, a "spiritual Strunk & White" (every bit one reviewer put it), and 2 more that deserve to, Holy the Firm, which might have been written in letters of flame, and Instruction a Rock to Talk, a jewel box of narrative meditations. (Some might add An American Childhood, her celebrated memoir.) In the 17 years since, she's published one, and none since 2007.

The Abundance only serves to underscore the dearth. The subtitle, Narrative Essays Old and New, is false ad; there are no new pieces here. The most recent essay in the book, which is also the only 1 not included in a previous volume, is eleven years onetime. At that place are many reasons a writer might irksome down or fifty-fifty end, nearly of them mysterious to strangers. Merely Dillard's turn to silence, if that is what it is, could in retrospect be seen as having been inevitable all along—given her selection of materials, her idiosyncratic sensibility, the very nature of her project.

Dillard declared her arrival, at the historic period of 28—brash and bold and talented beyond conventionalities—with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). The book was unabashed about its lineage. An ardent young American takes to the forest, anchoring herself abreast a water. Sojourning for many a flavor, she distills her experience down to a symbolic single year. "I suggest to keep here," she announces at the start of her business relationship, "what Thoreau chosen 'a meteorological journal of the mind.' " She scrutinizes nature with monastic patience and a microscopic eye. She delivers doctrine with the certainty of revelation and the airs (and agedness) of youth. She summons us to wake from slow routine. With flourishes of brass, she proclaims a new dawn.

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The text itself is thickly planted with marvels to watch for, its vision fresh equally Adam's on the first day. A creek bank is a "twiggy haze." A gibbous moon is "softly frayed, like the heel of a sock." "Information technology snowed all yesterday and never emptied the sky," Dillard tells us. "Any object at a distance—like the dead, ivy-covered walnut I see from the bay window—looked like a blackness-and-white frontispiece seen through the sheet of white tissue." But she doesn't need a simile to send a sense aloft. Muskrats in their dens "strew the floor with establish husks and seeds, rut in repeated bursts, and sleep humped and soaking, huddled in balls." The linguistic communication makes of brute factuality a exact music. An egg example of a praying mantis "has a dead harbinger, dead weed color, and a curious brittle texture, hard as varnish, simply pitted minutely, like frozen cream." At that place are flashes of sense of humour likewise. Newts "are altogether excellent creatures, if somewhat moist, but no one pays the least attention to them, except children." Children, of course, and her.

Yet for all Dillard's brilliance equally a nature writer, nature isn't finally her subject. She situates herself on territory like Thoreau's only faces toward a very different compass point. He too went to nature, truth be told, with other things in mind. He looked at the pond, but he was thinking almost Concur—how the people at that place lived, and how it might be possible to alive another way. Walden'due south first, long affiliate is titled "Economy," complete with lists of expenditures for things similar nails and lard. Nosotros sentry him build his famous fiddling business firm, and constitute his beans, and chop his forest, which warms him twice.

But in Pilgrim there is no economy and no society. We don't know how Dillard lives, or how she makes a living, or much of annihilation about her circumstances. Withal the occasional, distant presence of neighbors in the book, it comes as a surprise to detect her describing the creek's vicinity, in a subsequent volume, every bit suburban—and a shock to learn, from biographical sources, that she was married the whole fourth dimension. In a curious way, she is absent from her own book, at least as more an Emersonian eyeball (albeit 1 that's cabled to a buzzing brain), and others are absent altogether. The cabin near Concord had plenty of visitors—in fact, there'south a whole chapter in Walden called "Visitors"—among whom was Thoreau's dear friend Ellery Channing. Dillard has a companion named Ellery Channing likewise, simply he's a goldfish. Thoreau, whose commandment is "simplify," wants to reconstruct society from the ground up. Dillard, whose law is "await," only wants to renovate your soul.

She looks at crayfish, looks at copperheads, looks at a trivial greenish frog, half out of the water, that as she watches "crumpled and began to sag… shrinking before my eyes similar a deflating football," its innards liquefied and emptied by a behemothic bitter issues. Only looking at these marvels, she is always looking for God. She is not a naturalist, not an environmentalist; she's a theologian—a pilgrim. Her field notes on the physical world are recorded every bit researches toward the fundamental metaphysical conundra: Why is at that place something rather than nothing, and what on Globe are we doing here? What, in other words—with crayfish and copperheads and giant biting bugs, with creeks and stars and human beings with their sense of beauty—does God have in mind?

Dillard, needless to say, does non answer these questions. Simply the striking affair nigh her search for God is that she sometimes finds him. Pilgrim'south 2nd chapter, after a kind of introduction, is titled "Seeing." (Both sections are included in The Abundance.) There are two kinds, she explains. The mutual variety is active, where y'all strain, against the running babble of internal monologue, to pay attention to what's really in forepart of you lot. That'south the sort of seeing that produces perceptions, and phrases, like twiggy haze. Just, she tells us, "there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go." Y'all do not seek, y'all wait. Information technology isn't prayer; it is grace. The visions come to y'all, and they come from out of the blue.

The distinction is akin to Proust's 2 forms of retentiveness. His holy grail, yous might recall, is the involuntary kind, the kind that bursts upon you unexpectedly, as when the narrator's unabridged childhood unfurls from the madeleine. That is the epiphany; that is the miracle. So information technology is with Dillard. She tells usa well-nigh a girl who was cured of congenital blindness and, being taken into a garden, saw, equally she put information technology, "the tree with the lights in it." It was for that tree, Dillard says, that she herself searched for years:

And so one mean solar day, walking along Tinker Creek, thinking of cipher at all, I saw it—the tree with the lights in it. It was the same lawn cedar where the mourning doves roost, only charged and transfigured, each prison cell buzzing with flame … Information technology was less similar seeing than like being for the first fourth dimension seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance … I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew information technology until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

The run across is erotic ("knocked breathless by a powerful glance"), like the ecstasies of Saint Teresa. God has seen and seized her, claimed her. This, once again, is something very different from Thoreau's experience. To use a pair of terms that Dillard introduces in a afterwards book, she is not a pantheist (equally he was) but a panentheist. God, panentheism says, is not coextensive with, identical to, the concrete earth, the globe of nature. He is a being that transcends it even every bit he dwells within information technology. Get rid of nature, for the pantheist, and you get rid of God. Go rid of nature, for the panentheist, and you see him all the clearer. That, I remember, is why information technology has to exist a creek for Dillard, not a swimming. Walden, in its depth and stillness (the attributes Thoreau insists upon most keenly), symbolizes nature's stability and serenity. The earth abides and always volition. Merely the creek, for Dillard, is energy, divine spirit, "the stream of light pouring down." The globe does not bide. Creation is continuous, and the heavens volition be rolled up as a scroll. She watches the water, but waits for the flame.

Thoreau runs his narrative year from spring to spring—nature filling up, emptying, and starting to fill up again. Dillard runs her own from winter to winter; the emphasis is on the emptiness. In an afterword written for the 25th-ceremony edition, she reveals a deeper, 2-function structure. "Neoplatonic Christianity described two routes to God: the via positiva and the via negativa. Philosophers on the via positiva affirm that God… possesses all positive attributes." Those along the other pathway "stressed God'due south unknowability." They "jettisoned everything that was non God; they hoped that what was left would be only the divine night." Pilgrim, Dillard says, walks both routes in succession. The beginning half, culminating with the summer solstice, is the plenitude; the second the reduction. A final affiliate recapitulates the motion. Its epigraph—employed again in The Abundance—comes from the Koran. "They will question thee concerning what they should expend. Say: 'The Abundance.' " Accumulate, then spend. Accumulate to spend. Assemble nature to get rid of it—but you tin't go rid of information technology until you've done the formic labor that such gathering entails.

Get rid of nature, to see the God who dwells in nature. It sounds paradoxical, and it is. (Dillard quotes Augustine in a after book: "If yous practice understand, then it is not God.") But Dillard has been chasing that paradox e'er since. The via negativa, with its purity and stringency, clearly proved to be the more congenial path. Virginia, where she'd come for college, did not turn out to be her landscape. From Tinker Creek, beneath the Bluish Ridge Mountains in the lushness of the Roanoke Valley, she decamped, the yr after publishing Pilgrim, for a place considerably more than ascetic: Lummi Island, in the northern reaches of Puget Sound. The region, with its wall of mountains to the east and countless salted ocean to the due west, was for her, as she was shortly to call information technology, "the edge of the known and comprehended world… the western rim of the existent… the fringey edge… where time and eternity spatter each other with foam"—a place, in other words, where nature stops and the darkness of divinity begins.

The clarification comes from Holy the Business firm (1977), the piece of work she proceeded to write in that location, a volume that is to Pilgrim what Lummi Island is to Tinker Creek. It throws out the crayfish and copperheads, the frogs, the bugs, the twigs, the scientific lore, all meanderings of idea and ambulation. The text runs 65 pages, brusque ones, and the prose seems pressed out drop by drop. Dillard later said the book took 14 months to write, full-fourth dimension, which works out to something like 25 words a day. The sentences are bitten stone, bitter water, biting wind: "Nix is going to happen in this book. There is simply a petty violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time."

The concluding phrase articulates the book's cardinal theme. For eternity, read "God." For time, read "the world" (i.e., us). For clips, read "kills"—or maims, burns, starves, causes anguish or grief—that "trivial violence here and in that location." Dillard subsequently explained, in An American Childhood (1987), that she had quit her church, at age 16, over the problem of suffering, the evident impossibility of reconciling the idea of a loving God with the circumstances that prevail in his cosmos, the law of universal hurting. This is the problem of Job, and like whoever wrote his story, Dillard doesn't endeavour to offering a solution. She knows that all y'all can really do is frame the question, which she does by telling us most a child named Julie Norwich. Julie is a local girl, 7 years old. Holy the Firm presents itself as the record of 3 days on the island. On the 2nd, Julie goes down in a plane crash—her father, flying the craft, is unharmed—and has her face burnt off.

I incertitude that Julie Norwich ever existed. Her proper noun is an echo of Julian of Norwich, the medieval anchoress and mystic, whom Dillard had alluded to in Pilgrim. Julie'southward parents are Jesse and Ann, the father of King David (a figure for Christ in Christian typology) and the mother of the Virgin Mary. Dillard besides gives us dates for the book's events (for example, Friday, November xx) that seem deliberately to misalign with the 2 years during which the narrative might have taken place. But it doesn't matter whether Julie is existent. Her story is a parable, like Chore's. Her story is a riddle, like his. Why practice such things happen? For they happen all the time and everywhere around us. In "The Deer at Providencia," an essay published only around the time she moved to Puget Sound (also reproduced in The Abundance), Dillard writes about a trip to South America. I day she sees a deer tied up in a village. It's going to be dinner that night. In linguistic communication flayed to rawness she describes its suffering:

Trying to get itself free of the rope, the deer had cut its own cervix with its hooves … Now three of its feet were hooked in the rope under its jaw. Information technology could non stand … so it could not movement to slacken the rope and ease the pull on its pharynx … Its hip jerked; its spine shook. Its eyes rolled; its tongue, thick with spit, pushed in and out.

She might be a god on Olympus, looking downwards impassively on human suffering. (She's also testing us to come across how we react.) Afterwards she eats a lavish luncheon, including a venison stew. Her companions, older men, are surprised at her detachment. "Gentlemen of the metropolis," she apostrophizes them in the essay, "what surprises you? That there is suffering hither, or that I know information technology?" She has thought almost the fact that she (and we, and many, many other animals) eat meat. "These things are not issues," she tells united states. "They are mysteries."

Issues are addressed; mysteries are witnessed. The story of Julie Norwich, in the second part of Holy the Firm, is prefigured by another story in the first. (The most historic passage in the book, the earlier story is also in the new collection.) Dillard is camping ground. A moth gets stuck in her candle flame. It burns—and so, a hollowed vanquish, a wick, it keeps on burning. "The moth's head was fire. She burned for two hours… similar a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read past her lite, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems." The final reference blossoms in the volume'due south final 3rd. The virgin Julie, consecrated by the touch of God, will still undoubtedly become back into the globe, Dillard thinks. And so she herself will be the nun, the anchoress, instead. Which means the poet, the artist: caput afire, channeling the Holy Spirit, "lighting the kingdom of God for the people to see." Giving her life to illuminate the divine darkness. Begetting witness to the dearest.

Such is the vocation Dillard expands on in The Writing Life (1989). The book is not a manual of tips. It is a portrait of the artist as a soul, its moral qualities and moral situation, offered in the second person. "You were fabricated and gear up here to give vocalization to this, your own astonishment." And: "Spend information technology all, shoot it, play it, lose information technology, all, right away, every time." The book proceeds, like all her finest work, as a serial of extended metaphors. The writer is a miner with a option; the author is a airplane pilot with a plane; the writer is a rower in a skiff, towing a log against the current, heading stoutly always in the aforementioned direction. The book'south dominant motif is the single room: a shed on Cape Cod, a cabin on a Puget beach, an office, a study, a carrel (a cockpit, a skiff)—the hermit's cell, the mind alone with itself. "1 wants a room with no view, and so imagination can come across retention in the dark."

The work is a collage, like all her finest books. Dillard has remarked that her objective equally a writer of prose has been to reproduce, on a larger scale, verse's "capacity for deep internal structures of meaning." (Her first volume, in 1974, was a volume of lyrics, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel. Afterwards, in 1995, she published Mornings Like This, whose poems are assemblages of sentences from other people'south books, one book per poem.) She creates these structures like an artisan working in stained drinking glass. A slice of this, a slice of that, a moment, a story, a scientific fact, a chip of spiritual wisdom: underneath, an atomic number 26 structure; on the surface, what appears to be a mind at dazzling play. Pilgrim was assembled from a heap of index cards. " 'Seeing,' " that second chapter, "gave me so much trouble to put together I nearly abandoned the book." For the Time Being (1999), her most recent piece of work but one, consists of seven sections, each one cycling through a set of rubrics in fixed order ("nascency," "sand," "Red china," "clouds"), 10 of them, a kind of rosary, their facets winking as they're turned and turned about. The meanings happen in the parts, and in the spaces in between them.

In Teaching a Rock to Talk (1982), the pieces are essays themselves. The collection, which includes "The Deer at Providencia," might just exist her greatest book, and it receives the largest share of The Abundance. Its finest slice, its central piece, the i that's chosen to conclude the new collection, is "An Expedition to the Pole." The essay is a single long extended metaphor in which the journey toward the Absolute—a 1000 a the God of silence—which she elsewhere calls "this feckless prospecting in the dark for the unseen," the lifelong try to know the unknowable and to say the unsayable, is likened to the polar expeditions of yore. To about of us, every bit Dillard knows, the effort seems completely pointless. To her it is the only thing that gives our life a point.

Brand no error virtually her spiritual extremity. This is a woman who has seen angels (equally she tells us in another essay), who has seen visions, who has seen the tree with the lights in it, which some other witness called the burning bush-league. Just miracles like that, she afterward came to feel, are things that happen only to the young. Her mission since may be conceived of equally a quest to recapture those glimpses by other, more deliberate means. No longer could she count on cracks appearing all of a sudden in the midst of things through which the holy might pour. So she went to the edges. Afterward Virginia, the scenes of her writing are almost uniformly places of, or adjacent to, emptiness: Puget Sound, Cape Cod, the Alaskan Arctic, the Galápagos, the deserts of Cathay and Israel—the wilderness, eternal haunt of seekers. Virginia itself, which she left effectually the time she turned 30, may exist seen, in its spiritual fecundity, as a kind of figure for youth, her empty spaces as a metaphor for middle historic period.

The only thing that gives our life a betoken. Dillard, similar Thoreau, is never shy well-nigh pronouncing wholesale condemnation on the style her fellows live. To her the mass of men atomic number 82 lives not of serenity desperation but of superficiality, insensibility, and rank illusion. Nosotros live as if we think we're never going to die. We live equally if our petty business concern counted. We live equally if we weren't as numerous as sand, and each of us imperceptible equally clouds. We live every bit if at that place hadn't been a hundred thousand generations here before us, and another hundred thousand were not notwithstanding to come. Even so all effectually united states holiness and grace, freely given every moment for the taking.

One of the most remarkable things about her work, in fact, is simply how much is absent from it. No economy, no society: no current events, no public affairs, no social engagement. With few exceptions, her writing seems to have place entirely exterior the history of its own time. (A contrast may exist drawn with Marilynne Robinson, Dillard'southward nearest kin amid gimmicky authors, whose religious convictions are inseparable from strong political and social commitments.) "I had a head for religious ideas," Dillard reports in An American Childhood, her chronicle of growing upwards in postwar, upper-class Pittsburgh, a book that is largely concerned with the development, in solitude, of the writer's own consciousness. "They made other ideas seem hateful."

That feeling, it appears, has never altered. The social novel, the novel that "aims to fasten down the spirit of its time," she tells the states in The Writing Life, "has never seemed to me worth doing." Her own novels, The Living (1992) and The Maytrees (2007), each a brilliant performance, notice different ways to eschew the contemporary. The first is a multigenerational saga, set in the late 19th century, most the earliest white settlements near Puget Sound, written, with remarkable fidelity and tact, in period idiom. But information technology isn't really about history, either, in the sense of thinking that it matters, or seeing it in terms of some kind of development, or tracing its connections, if merely implicitly, to the present. Similar all her piece of work, the novel is nigh the fact of beingness live, for a cursory span, within the overwhelming context of the natural globe. The Maytrees, her most contempo book—its prose a prodigy of velocity and precision, language concentrated to an essence—dissents in space instead of time, taking up a handful of Provincetown bohemians, a kind of spiritual elect, who devote themselves to fine art, simplicity, and contemplation out in that location on the Outer Greatcoat. Dillard's heed is on eternity; she couldn't give a damn nearly the spirit of her time.

That, of course, is her prerogative (though the odor of self-congratulation starts to get a little thick in The Maytrees). Merely it points to several problems, and across them, to a primal limitation. For she is not content to walk her path in solitude. She also wants to tell u.s.a. how to live. She has an ethic equally well as a metaphysic, and it consists, in its entirety, of worship. "Quit your tents," she preaches. "Pray without ceasing." Dillard doesn't seem to understand information technology'due south not that simple, and I think information technology'southward fair to note here not only that her family was rich, but that she married, in college, an established professional person (and published, early on, a perennial best seller). "Information technology is noble piece of work," she says in reference to another pilgrim's spiritual exercises, "and beats, from any angle, selling shoes." Except the role where you lot, you know, become to feed your family.

Dillard is not content to affirm her own way. She needs to denigrate all other ways (dissimilar Thoreau, who wrote, "I would not take any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for… I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible"). The social novel isn't simply non her affair; it'south not worth doing at all. The life in nature is skillful; the life of civilization, the life of cities, equally she repeatedly insists (it is a major theme in The Maytrees), is obsessed with stuff and status, the cultivation and display of good taste. The judgment seems, to put information technology mildly, overbroad. It sounds not like all life in all cities (and Dillard, as far as I can tell, hasn't lived in whatsoever cities since abandoning her native Pittsburgh after loftier schoolhouse), but like the white-gloved milieu that she tells us about in An American Childhood. Non to mention that the life of reading and writing to which she has devoted herself is inconceivable without civilization, and the cities where information technology'south principally created. Crayfish don't write books, and copperheads don't purchase them.

Only the problems go beyond hypocrisy and spiritual snobbery. Ordinarily, the idea that none of usa matters in the larger scheme of things is followed past the corrective that, of form, we matter a swell deal to one another, and need to take care of one another, and isn't that what life is after all about? The word for this is morality, also known every bit dear. But neither has much identify in Dillard's idea. For the Time Being, her last piece of work of nonfiction, the volume of seven parts and x rubrics, represents, amongst other things, a long meditation over her decades of reading in the literature of spirit. Its hero is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Catholic priest, paleontologist, and theologian. Second place goes to the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. Simply Teilhard and the Baal Shem, mystics though they were, had codes of conduct, codes of service, too, which came to them from their religions. Dillard seems, at to the lowest degree in this late piece of work, to sense what she is missing. Every one time in a while, she pulls a kind of quarterback sneak, smuggling morality ("aiding and serving the afflicted and poor," "a holy and empathetic intention") into the give-and-take. The effect is of a man who finishes rebuilding the engine of his automobile and, finding a bolt on the driveway, balances it advisedly on the hood. The bolt, in Dillard'south case, is the unabridged universe of man attachment.

Which brings us to her limitation. Dillard is a hedgehog masquerading every bit a play a joke on. She seems to know many footling things—those myriad natural phenomena that she is so magnificent at seeing and describing—but in fact she knows one big matter. She knows that nosotros are born with souls but die in bodies. That is a very big thing. It is the biggest thing. She is the queen of the hedgehogs. Simply it is however simply one matter.

And that, I call up, may be the explanation for her movement into silence. Her works are each unique in formal terms, but there are only so many times, and so many ways, that you can make the aforementioned points. Already in her last two books, the only ones that she has written in more than twenty years, it feels as if, thematically at least, she is but giving the old prayer bicycle another spin. The Abundance, a collage of existing cloth, is, by definition, cipher new. One hopes information technology heralds a render. One fears it is a valedictory.

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/where-have-you-gone-annie-dillard/426843/

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