Could it be more perfect? Wallace Stevens in his forties, living in Hartford, Connecticut, hewed to a productive routine. He rose at six, read for two hours, and walked another hour—three miles—to work. He dictated poems to his secretary. He ate no lunch; at noon he walked for another hour, often to an art gallery. He walked home from work—another hour. After dinner he retired to his study; he went to bed at nine. On Sundays, he walked in the park. Perhaps he exchanged a few words with his wife, who posed for the Liberty dime.
One would rather read these people, or lead their lives, than be their wives. When the Danish aristocrat Wilhelm Dinesen shot birds all day, drank schnapps, napped, and dressed for dinner, he and his wife had three children under three. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant?
Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones? I have been reading about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance. Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and across the highway, is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of shallowness, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk.
Hollins Pond is also called Murray's Pond; it covers two acres of bottomland near Tinker Creek with six inches of water and six thousand lily pads. In winter, brown-and-white steers stand in the middle of it, merely dampening their hooves; from the distant shore they look like miracle itself, complete with miracle's nonchalance.
Now, in summer, the steers are gone. The water lilies have blossomed and spread to a green horizontal plane that is terra firma to plodding blackbirds, and tremulous ceiling to black leeches, crayfish, and carp. This is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none is visible here.
There's a 55 mph highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other. Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods, fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks--in whose bare clay wild turtles lay eggs. I had crossed the highway, stepped over two low barbed-wire fences, and traced the motorcycle path in all gratitude through the wild rose and poison ivy of the pond's shoreline up into high grassy fields.
Then I cut down through the woods to the mossy fallen tree where I sit. This tree is excellent. It makes a dry, upholstered bench at the upper, marshy end of the pond, a plush jetty raised from the thorny shore between a shallow blue body of water and a deep blue body of sky.
The sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, ensconced in the lap of lichen, watching the lily pads at my feet tremble and part dreamily over the thrusting path of a carp. A yellow bird appeared to my right and flew behind me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around--and the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.
I'd never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard's; he would have made a good arrowhead. Get rid of nature, for the panentheist, and you see him all the clearer. That, I think, is why it has to be a creek for Dillard, not a pond. The world abides and always will. Creation is continuous, and the heavens will 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-anniversary edition, she reveals a deeper, two-part structure. Philosophers on the via positiva assert that God… possesses all positive attributes.
The first half, culminating with the summer solstice, is the plenitude; the second the reduction. A final chapter recapitulates the movement. Its epigraph—employed again in The Abundance —comes from the Koran. Accumulate to spend. Get rid of nature, to see the God who dwells in nature. It sounds paradoxical, and it is. The via negativa , with its purity and stringency, clearly proved to be the more congenial path.
From Tinker Creek, beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains in the lushness of the Roanoke Valley, she decamped, the year after publishing Pilgrim , for a place considerably more austere: Lummi Island, in the northern reaches of Puget Sound. The description comes from Holy the Firm , the work she proceeded to write there, a book 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 thought and ambulation.
The text runs 65 pages, short ones, and the prose seems pressed out drop by drop. Dillard later said the book took 14 months to write, full-time, which works out to something like 25 words a day. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.
She knows that all you can really do is frame the question, which she does by telling us about a child named Julie Norwich. Julie is a local girl, 7 years old. Holy the Firm presents itself as the record of three days on the island. On the second, Julie goes down in a plane crash—her father, flying the craft, is unharmed—and has her face burnt off.
I doubt that Julie Norwich ever existed. Her name is an echo of Julian of Norwich, the medieval anchoress and mystic, whom Dillard had alluded to in Pilgrim. Her story is a riddle, like his. Why do such things happen?
For they happen all the time and everywhere around us. One day she sees a deer tied up in a village. In language flayed to rawness she describes its suffering:. Trying to get itself free of the rope, the deer had cut its own neck with its hooves … Now three of its feet were hooked in the rope under its jaw. It could not stand … so it could not move to slacken the rope and ease the pull on its throat … 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 down impassively on human suffering. I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note. There is a word for this kind of writer, the kind that acts like a guide, the sort who enters into a fellowship with you and brings you with her wherever her thoughts lead, high or low, grand or lowly, who writes about the world without even knowing what to do with it: essayist.
To be an essayist is a fine purpose, but a purpose lasts only so long. As with lives. Socrates is a man. All men die. Socrates must, well, you know the line. Hold nothing back. The well will refill. So we go on, filling the silence. Or, perhaps, finding the silences and listening to what they will tell us. The day that I began writing this essay, I went for a run.
This is how most of my essays begin. Thoughts and observations and quotes and ideas, a mute mess. I go for a run and the ideas begin to knock loose from one another and then back together again in a pattern that makes sense, that gathers into something far stronger.
I ran as I often do along the edge of Riverside Park, past pre-war buildings on the Upper West Side, past plaques that commemorate where J. Robert Oppenheimer lived or where Edgar Allen Poe wrote his poems. I thought about history. I thought about how we all end up swallowed by silence. Traffic had snarled the on and off ramps from the West Side Highway. I stopped for Gatorade near the Museum of Natural History.
On Columbus Avenue, I noticed a new bookstore. I wandered inside to have a look. An essay section near the rear offered two columns of books. I searched the Staff Recommendations table. I searched the display table for Our Favorite Reads. This made me angry. Someone needs to change this, I thought.
More people need to know about Dillard. One more thing happened. The important thing. Exiting the bookstore in a huff, tired, irritated, I noticed the wreckage of a black BMW at the curb.
It had been there earlier. It was a total ruin, wheels gone, windows shattered, hood crumpled, left side flat as if smashfisted by a giant. There was no explanatory sign, no one standing watch, no one paying mind. Just a casual profundity. Did you see the wreck? Did you read Holy the Firm? Did you look up in time for the eclipse?
Do you know Annie Dillard? Did I hear you call my name, or was that the voice of God? He is the author of Only the Trying , a book-length essay on the nature of illness and recovery. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children. You can follow him on Twitter at Literotaur.
Thank you, thank you Bryan for this piece. Time to reread Holy The Firm again I think. I am a student of Buddhism and I know of no other writer who, to me, is the pure embodiment of awareness…it is what we should all strive for all the time.
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