What Is It That Dillard Never Wants to Witness Again in a Feild of Silence?

Emmanuel Polanco

Where Have Y'all Gone, Annie Dillard?

Why the author has go and so much less prolific over the by 17 years

T he abundance, a choice from the work of one of the dandy, original voices in recent American letters, might just as easily be chosen The Absence. Information technology speaks of absence—for nature'due south profusion, in Annie Dillard, is everywhere the signage of the hidden god she seeks—and it too marks an absence: hers. Dillard'south first book appeared in 1974. Over the following 25 years, she published x more than 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 ane reviewer put information technology), and two more that deserve to, Holy the Firm, which might have been written in messages of flame, and Teaching a Stone to Talk, a jewel box of narrative meditations. (Some might add together An American Childhood, her celebrated memoir.) In the 17 years since, she'southward published i, and none since 2007.

The Abundance only serves to underscore the dearth. The subtitle, Narrative Essays Old and New, is false advertising; in that location are no new pieces here. The well-nigh recent essay in the book, which is also the only one not included in a previous volume, is eleven years old. There are many reasons a writer might slow down or fifty-fifty finish, near of them mysterious to strangers. But 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 alleged her arrival, at the age of 28—brash and bold and talented beyond belief—with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). The book was unabashed about its lineage. An agog young American takes to the woods, anchoring herself beside a water. Sojourning for many a flavour, she distills her feel down to a symbolic unmarried year. "I propose to keep here," she announces at the start of her account, "what Thoreau called 'a meteorological journal of the mind.' " She scrutinizes nature with monastic patience and a microscopic center. She delivers doctrine with the certainty of revelation and the arrogance (and agedness) of youth. She summons us to wake from dull routine. With flourishes of brass, she proclaims a new dawn.

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The text itself is thickly planted with marvels to sentry for, its vision fresh as Adam'due south on the offset day. A creek banking company is a "twiggy haze." A gibbous moon is "softly frayed, like the heel of a sock." "It snowed all yesterday and never emptied the heaven," Dillard tells the states. "Any object at a distance—like the dead, ivy-covered walnut I run across from the bay window—looked similar a blackness-and-white frontispiece seen through the sheet of white tissue." Only she doesn't need a simile to ship a sense aloft. Muskrats in their dens "strew the floor with plant husks and seeds, rut in repeated bursts, and sleep humped and soaking, huddled in balls." The language makes of fauna factuality a verbal music. An egg case of a praying mantis "has a dead straw, expressionless weed color, and a curious brittle texture, hard as varnish, but pitted minutely, like frozen foam." There are flashes of sense of humor equally well. Newts "are altogether excellent creatures, if somewhat moist, just no i pays the least attention to them, except children." Children, of course, and her.

Yet for all Dillard's brilliance as a nature writer, nature isn't finally her subject. She situates herself on territory like Thoreau'due south but faces toward a very different compass point. He also went to nature, truth be told, with other things in heed. He looked at the pond, but he was thinking about Concord—how the people at that place lived, and how information technology might be possible to live another way. Walden'southward commencement, long chapter is titled "Economy," complete with lists of expenditures for things like nails and lard. We sentry him build his famous trivial firm, and found his beans, and chop his wood, which warms him twice.

But in Pilgrim in that location is no economy and no lodge. We don't know how Dillard lives, or how she makes a living, or much of anything most her circumstances. Notwithstanding the occasional, afar presence of neighbors in the book, information technology comes as a surprise to find her describing the creek'south vicinity, in a subsequent volume, as suburban—and a shock to learn, from biographical sources, that she was married the whole time. In a curious fashion, she is absent from her own book, at least as more than an Emersonian eyeball (albeit ane that'southward cabled to a buzzing encephalon), and others are absent-minded altogether. The cabin near Concur had plenty of visitors—in fact, at that place's a whole chapter in Walden called "Visitors"—among whom was Thoreau's beloved friend Ellery Channing. Dillard has a companion named Ellery Channing too, merely he's a goldfish. Thoreau, whose commandment is "simplify," wants to reconstruct order from the ground upwards. Dillard, whose law is "await," only wants to renovate your soul.

She looks at crayfish, looks at copperheads, looks at a fiddling green frog, half out of the water, that as she watches "crumpled and began to sag… shrinking earlier my eyes like a deflating football," its innards liquefied and emptied by a behemothic biting bug. Merely looking at these marvels, she is always looking for God. She is non a naturalist, not an environmentalist; she's a theologian—a pilgrim. Her field notes on the physical earth are recorded as researches toward the key metaphysical conundra: Why is there something rather than nothing, and what on Earth are nosotros doing hither? What, in other words—with crayfish and copperheads and giant biting bugs, with creeks and stars and human being beings with their sense of dazzler—does God take in mind?

Dillard, needless to say, does non reply these questions. Simply the striking thing about her search for God is that she sometimes finds him. Pilgrim'southward second chapter, after a kind of introduction, is titled "Seeing." (Both sections are included in The Abundance.) There are two kinds, she explains. The mutual diverseness is active, where you strain, confronting the running babble of internal monologue, to pay attention to what'southward actually in front of you. That's the sort of seeing that produces perceptions, and phrases, similar twiggy brume. But, she tells us, "at that place is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go." You do non seek, y'all wait. Information technology isn't prayer; it is grace. The visions come up to you, and they come from out of the bluish.

The distinction is akin to Proust's two forms of retentiveness. His holy grail, you might think, is the involuntary kind, the kind that bursts upon you unexpectedly, as when the narrator'due south entire childhood unfurls from the madeleine. That is the epiphany; that is the miracle. And then information technology is with Dillard. She tells us nearly a girl who was cured of congenital blindness and, existence taken into a garden, saw, every bit she put it, "the tree with the lights in information technology." It was for that tree, Dillard says, that she herself searched for years:

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

The run across is erotic ("knocked incoherent by a powerful glance"), like the ecstasies of Saint Teresa. God has seen and seized her, claimed her. This, again, is something very dissimilar from Thoreau'south feel. To use a pair of terms that Dillard introduces in a later book, she is not a pantheist (every bit he was) but a panentheist. God, panentheism says, is not coextensive with, identical to, the concrete world, the world of nature. He is a existence that transcends it fifty-fifty as he dwells within it. Get rid of nature, for the pantheist, and you get rid of God. 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, non a pond. Walden, in its depth and stillness (the attributes Thoreau insists upon most keenly), symbolizes nature's stability and tranquility. The world abides and ever will. But the creek, for Dillard, is free energy, divine spirit, "the stream of light pouring down." The globe does non abide. Creation is continuous, and the heavens will be rolled upwardly every bit a scroll. She watches the water, but waits for the flame.

Thoreau runs his narrative year from jump to spring—nature filling up, emptying, and starting to fill up up over again. Dillard runs her own from winter to wintertime; the emphasis is on the emptiness. In an afterword written for the 25th-ceremony edition, she reveals a deeper, two-part structure. "Neoplatonic Christianity described two routes to God: the via positiva and the via negativa. Philosophers on the via positiva assert that God… possesses all positive attributes." Those along the other pathway "stressed God's unknowability." They "jettisoned everything that was not God; they hoped that what was left would exist only the divine dark." Pilgrim, Dillard says, walks both routes in succession. The kickoff half, culminating with the summer solstice, is the plenitude; the second the reduction. A final chapter recapitulates the move. Its epigraph—employed again in The Abundance—comes from the Koran. "They volition question thee concerning what they should expend. Say: 'The Affluence.' " Accumulate, then spend. Accumulate to spend. Gather nature to get rid of information technology—but you tin't get rid of it 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 later volume: "If you practice understand, and so information technology is not God.") Merely Dillard has been chasing that paradox ever since. The via negativa, with its purity and stringency, conspicuously proved to be the more congenial path. Virginia, where she'd come for college, did not turn out to exist her landscape. 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 ascetic: Lummi Isle, in the northern reaches of Puget Audio. The region, with its wall of mountains to the due east and endless salted body of water to the west, was for her, equally she was soon to telephone 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 Firm (1977), the work she proceeded to write there, a book that is to Pilgrim what Lummi Isle 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 past driblet. Dillard later said the book took xiv months to write, total-time, which works out to something like 25 words a day. The sentences are bitten rock, biting water, biting current of air: "Zip is going to happen in this book. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time."

The last phrase articulates the volume's central theme. For eternity, read "God." For time, read "the globe" (i.e., us). For clips, read "kills"—or maims, burns, starves, causes anguish or grief—that "little violence here and in that location." Dillard later 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 creation, the law of universal pain. This is the problem of Job, and like whoever wrote his story, Dillard doesn't try to offer a solution. She knows that all y'all can really practise is frame the question, which she does past telling us about a child named Julie Norwich. Julie is a local daughter, 7 years erstwhile. Holy the House presents itself every bit the record of iii 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. Julie'due south 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 also gives us dates for the book's events (for example, Friday, November twenty) that seem deliberately to misalign with the two years during which the narrative might accept taken place. Only it doesn't thing whether Julie is real. Her story is a parable, similar Task'due south. Her story is a riddle, similar his. Why do such things happen? For they happen all the time and everywhere around united states of america. In "The Deer at Providencia," an essay published just around the time she moved to Puget Audio (also reproduced in The Abundance), Dillard writes about a trip to Due south America. 1 twenty-four hour period she sees a deer tied up in a hamlet. It's going to be dinner that dark. In language flayed to rawness she describes its suffering:

Trying to get itself complimentary 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 up … 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 downwardly impassively on man suffering. (She's also testing united states of america to come across how nosotros react.) Afterwards she eats a lavish dejeuner, including a venison stew. Her companions, older men, are surprised at her detachment. "Gentlemen of the city," she apostrophizes them in the essay, "what surprises yous? That at that place is suffering here, or that I know it?" She has idea about the fact that she (and nosotros, and many, many other animals) eat meat. "These things are not problems," she tells us. "They are mysteries."

Problems are addressed; mysteries are witnessed. The story of Julie Norwich, in the second part of Holy the Firm, is prefigured by some other story in the get-go. (The near celebrated passage in the volume, the earlier story is also in the new drove.) Dillard is camping. A moth gets stuck in her candle flame. Information technology burns—and then, a hollowed shell, a wick, information technology keeps on called-for. "The moth's caput was burn. She burned for ii hours… like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her low-cal, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thou poems." The concluding reference blossoms in the volume'southward terminal third. The virgin Julie, consecrated by the touch of God, volition nonetheless undoubtedly go back into the earth, Dillard thinks. So she herself will be the nun, the anchoress, instead. Which means the poet, the artist: head 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 honey.

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 every bit a soul, its moral qualities and moral situation, offered in the second person. "Y'all were made and set up here to requite voice to this, your ain astonishment." And: "Spend information technology all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every fourth dimension." The book proceeds, like all her finest piece of work, as a serial of extended metaphors. The author is a miner with a pick; the writer is a pilot with a plane; the author is a rower in a skiff, towing a log against the current, heading stoutly e'er in the same direction. The volume's ascendant motif is the unmarried room: a shed on Cape Cod, a motel on a Puget beach, an part, a written report, a carrel (a cockpit, a skiff)—the hermit'due south cell, the listen solitary with itself. "1 wants a room with no view, so imagination can see memory in the dark."

The piece of work is a collage, like all her finest books. Dillard has remarked that her objective as a writer of prose has been to reproduce, on a larger scale, verse'southward "capacity for deep internal structures of meaning." (Her first book, in 1974, was a book of lyrics, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel. Later, in 1995, she published Mornings Like This, whose poems are assemblages of sentences from other people's books, ane book per poem.) She creates these structures like an artisan working in stained glass. A piece of this, a piece of that, a moment, a story, a scientific fact, a bit of spiritual wisdom: underneath, an atomic number 26 construction; on the surface, what appears to be a mind at dazzling play. Pilgrim was assembled from a heap of index cards. " 'Seeing,' " that 2nd chapter, "gave me so much trouble to put together I nigh abandoned the volume." For the Time Being (1999), her nigh recent work but i, consists of seven sections, each ane cycling through a gear up of rubrics in fixed order ("birth," "sand," "People's republic of china," "clouds"), 10 of them, a kind of rosary, their facets winking every bit 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 be her greatest volume, and information technology receives the largest share of The Affluence. Its finest slice, its fundamental piece, the 1 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 k a the God of silence—which she elsewhere calls "this feckless prospecting in the dark for the unseen," the lifelong effort to know the unknowable and to say the unsayable, is likened to the polar expeditions of yore. To nigh of us, as Dillard knows, the effort seems completely pointless. To her information technology is the but thing that gives our life a signal.

Make no mistake about her spiritual extremity. This is a adult female who has seen angels (as she tells united states of america in another essay), who has seen visions, who has seen the tree with the lights in it, which another witness called the burning bush. Just miracles like that, she after came to experience, are things that happen merely to the young. Her mission since may exist conceived of as a quest to recapture those glimpses by other, more than deliberate means. No longer could she count on cracks appearing of a sudden in the midst of things through which the holy might pour. So she went to the edges. Afterwards Virginia, the scenes of her writing are almost uniformly places of, or side by side to, emptiness: Puget Audio, Cape Cod, the Alaskan Chill, the Galápagos, the deserts of China and Israel—the wilderness, eternal haunt of seekers. Virginia itself, which she left around the fourth dimension she turned 30, may be seen, in its spiritual fecundity, as a kind of effigy for youth, her empty spaces as a metaphor for middle age.

The just matter that gives our life a point. Dillard, like Thoreau, is never shy about pronouncing wholesale condemnation on the way her fellows alive. To her the mass of men lead lives non of quiet agony but of superficiality, insensibility, and rank illusion. Nosotros live as if we think nosotros're never going to die. Nosotros live as if our niggling business counted. We live as if we weren't as numerous equally sand, and each of us imperceptible every bit clouds. Nosotros alive as if there hadn't been a hundred m generations here before us, and another hundred thousand were not nonetheless to come. Still all around us holiness and grace, freely given every moment for the taking.

One of the most remarkable things about her piece of work, in fact, is just how much is absent from it. No economy, no society: no electric current events, no public affairs, no social appointment. With few exceptions, her writing seems to take identify entirely outside the history of its own time. (A contrast may exist fatigued with Marilynne Robinson, Dillard's nearest kin amid contemporary authors, whose religious convictions are inseparable from potent political and social commitments.) "I had a head for religious ideas," Dillard reports in An American Childhood, her chronicle of growing upward in postwar, upper-class Pittsburgh, a book that is largely concerned with the development, in solitude, of the author'southward ain consciousness. "They made other ideas seem mean."

That feeling, it appears, has never contradistinct. The social novel, the novel that "aims to fasten down the spirit of its time," she tells u.s.a. in The Writing Life, "has never seemed to me worth doing." Her ain novels, The Living (1992) and The Maytrees (2007), each a brilliant performance, find different means to eschew the contemporary. The first is a multigenerational saga, set in the belatedly 19th century, about the earliest white settlements near Puget Sound, written, with remarkable allegiance and tact, in catamenia idiom. Simply it isn't really about history, either, in the sense of thinking that it matters, or seeing information technology in terms of some kind of development, or tracing its connections, if just implicitly, to the nowadays. Like all her work, the novel is virtually the fact of beingness alive, for a brief bridge, within the overwhelming context of the natural world. The Maytrees, her almost recent book—its prose a prodigy of velocity and precision, language concentrated to an essence—dissents in space instead of time, taking up a scattering of Provincetown bohemians, a kind of spiritual elect, who devote themselves to art, simplicity, and contemplation out there on the Outer Greatcoat. Dillard'southward mind is on eternity; she couldn't give a damn most the spirit of her fourth dimension.

That, of course, is her prerogative (though the odor of self-congratulation starts to become a piffling thick in The Maytrees). Only information technology points to several problems, and beyond them, to a fundamental limitation. For she is not content to walk her path in solitude. She also wants to tell united states of america how to live. She has an ethic as well equally 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 it'south fair to annotation hither not just that her family unit was rich, but that she married, in college, an established professional (and published, early, a perennial best seller). "Information technology is noble piece of work," she says in reference to another pilgrim's spiritual exercises, "and beats, from whatsoever angle, selling shoes." Except the part where you, yous know, get to feed your family.

Dillard is not content to assert her own mode. She needs to denigrate all other ways (unlike Thoreau, who wrote, "I would non have whatever one adopt my mode of living on any account; for… I desire that there may be as many unlike persons in the world as possible"). The social novel isn't simply not her affair; it's not worth doing at all. The life in nature is skilful; the life of civilisation, the life of cities, equally she repeatedly insists (it is a major theme in The Maytrees), is obsessed with stuff and condition, the tillage and display of good gustation. The judgment seems, to put it mildly, overbroad. Information technology sounds not like all life in all cities (and Dillard, every bit far equally I can tell, hasn't lived in any cities since abandoning her native Pittsburgh later on loftier school), but like the white-gloved milieu that she tells the states near in An American Childhood. Not to mention that the life of reading and writing to which she has devoted herself is inconceivable without civilisation, and the cities where information technology's principally created. Crayfish don't write books, and copperheads don't buy them.

But the problems go beyond hypocrisy and spiritual snobbery. Unremarkably, the thought that none of the states matters in the larger scheme of things is followed by the corrective that, of grade, nosotros thing a great deal to one another, and need to have intendance of one another, and isn't that what life is afterward all about? The word for this is morality, as well known as dear. Simply neither has much place in Dillard's thought. For the Time Beingness, her last work of nonfiction, the volume of vii 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 Cosmic priest, paleontologist, and theologian. Second identify goes to the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. But Teilhard and the Baal Shem, mystics though they were, had codes of acquit, codes of service, also, which came to them from their religions. Dillard seems, at least 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 compassionate intention") into the word. The effect is of a man who finishes rebuilding the engine of his car and, finding a bolt on the driveway, balances it advisedly on the hood. The bolt, in Dillard's case, is the unabridged universe of human attachment.

Which brings the states to her limitation. Dillard is a hedgehog masquerading as a fox. She seems to know many little things—those myriad natural phenomena that she is so magnificent at seeing and describing—just in fact she knows 1 large affair. She knows that nosotros are born with souls but die in bodies. That is a very big affair. It is the biggest thing. She is the queen of the hedgehogs. But it is still simply one affair.

And that, I think, may exist 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 tin can brand the same points. Already in her final two books, the only ones that she has written in more than than 20 years, it feels as if, thematically at least, she is merely giving the old prayer cycle some other spin. The Abundance, a collage of existing material, is, by definition, aught new. 1 hopes it heralds a render. 1 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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