a writer of exceptional clarity, even when we are struggling to grasp the meaning of what is being said so clearly, so brightly.
Perhaps it’s this very lucidity that compels her to peer into the darkness of ethical and metaphysical questions. She has returned frequently to the old chestnut of suffering in the world (“Cruelty,” she writes in an insight worthy of Simone Weil, “is a mystery, and the waste of pain”), and it is here—to go back a paragraph—that we find more common ground with Cioran. In his despair as a young man, Cioran decided that “philosophy is no help at all, and offers absolutely no answers. So I turned to poetry and literature, where I found no answers either, but states of mind analogous to my own.” Dillard’s position on these matters is set out by a character in her novel The Maytrees:
Having limited philosophy’s objects to certainties, Wittgenstein later realized he broke, in however true a cause, his favorite toy, metaphysics, by forbidding it to enter anywhere interesting. For the balance of Wittgenstein’s life he studied, of all things, religions. Philosophy . . . had trivialized itself right out of the ball park. Nothing rose to plug the gap, to address what some called “ultimate concerns,” unless you count the arts, the arts that lacked both epistemological methods and accountability, and that drew nutty people, or drove them nuts.
These “ultimate concerns” are boiled down, on several occasions in Dillard’s work, to a single nutty question: “to wit, What in the Sam Hill is going on here?” Though she has written two fine novels, her answers tend not to come in novel form. The novel, after all, is generally programmed to describe and map the social landscape. This is neither her main area of thematic interest nor where her talents are uniquely displayed. Early on in An American Childhood, young Annie discovers “that I myself was both observer and observable, and so a possible object of my own humming awareness.” Welty, in her review of Pilgrim, was less than wholehearted in her admiration for this canary-in-the-me-mine method: “Annie Dillard is the only person in her book, substantially the only one in her world; I recall no outside human speech coming to break the long soliloquy of the author.” If this, for Welty, was almost the opposite of what it meant to be a writer, it was exactly what attracted Cioran to mystics and saints. Hostile to religion, he nevertheless developed an interest in the mystics because they “lived a more intense life than others. And, too, because of their extraordinary pride, me and God, God and me.” It is here, amidst what she calls “the literature of illumination,” that Dillard declares her genius most openly. Actually, let’s put that differently: It’s here that she has made her home.
Bear in mind also—the antecedents of Emerson and Thoreau are important—that while the light may be universal, it always falls in a particular way on a particular patch of ground. “I never saw a tree,” Dillard declares, in a valuable piece of advice to writers of any and every stripe, “that was no tree in particular.” At one point she insists, with the unflappable resolve of a lawyer’s dream witness, on having seen an angel in a field. I’m of the Courbet persuasion, but am inclined to believe her, less because she conceived of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as “what Thoreau called ‘a meteorological journal of the mind’ ” than because, after careful deliberation, she confided to her journal that Walden was “really a book about a pond.” In everything she writes she subscribes to the idea—attributed variously to Éluard or Yeats—that “there is another world, but it’s in this world.” Wherever you are in this world, she reminds us, “life is always and necessarily lived in the detail.”
Inevitably, then, she has been scrupulous in detailing her whereabouts: where she was from (An American Childhood), where she was living (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), and where she was going (Teaching a Stone to Talk). That kind of attentiveness means that she also needs to factor in whichever books she has in her duffel bag to sustain and nourish her in these places and phases. And so, at the risk of uprooting her from the native soil of Emerson and Thoreau, I feel similarly at liberty to open up my own bag of books and mention the three writers who, as the saying goes, beat a path to her door for me.
In Emerson: The Mind on Fire, Robert D. Richardson (Dillard’s husband) enables us to see—almost to share—how Emerson became the writer he did by reading the writers he read. These are the writers who formed him. But what of the path that draws readers to a writer they come to love? That, too, is formed by writers who not only prepare us for such encounters, but also subtly prepare the writer for us. In turn, this writer will prepare the way for other encounters further along the road. For the time being, though, Dillard is where I’m at: a temporary terminus.
The three writers who got me to this point have much in common with Dillard, not least a tendency—often regarded as fatal flaw in imaginative writers—to offer advice: one reason, perhaps, why none of them could confine their talents to the novel. First there is D. H. Lawrence, one of the most insistent and vehement offerers of advice in the English literary canon. But Lawrence’s hieratic tendency, the unwavering belief that he had some kind of cure for the sickness of his times, is always predicated on “his relationship, his bond with everything in creation.” The words are those of his widow, Frieda, who continued to be amazed by this—“no preconceived ideas, just a meeting between him and a creature, a tree, a cloud, anything”—long after his Salvator-Mundi sermonizing had become wearisome. We are in the jurisdiction of the detail, so let’s take a tiny example. When Lawrence writes of cypress trees in Twilight in Italy, “For as we have candles to light the darkness of night, so the cypresses are candles to keep the darkness aflame in the full sunshine,” he not only makes us see these particular trees in a very particular light; he also prepares our eyes for seeing (reading) pages by Dillard, which, in turn, bring Lawrence flaring back into life as her—and our—permanent contemporary.
Then there is Rebecca West. The fact that her tone and register are so different—grand where Dillard is scatty—should not distract us from the similarities both incidental and overarching (and therefore, ultimately, tonal). By baking a cake for friends, West realizes in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, “one is striking a low note on a scale that is struck higher up by Beethoven and Mozart.” In The Writing Life, Dillard expresses her admiration for a stunt pilot. “It was as if Mozart could move his body through his notes, and you could walk out on the porch, look up, and see him in periwig and breeches, flying around in the sky. You could hear the music as he dove through it; it streamed after him like a contrail.”
More generally, there is the shared tendency, the strength of the urge, towards ultimate concerns. Asked to write a book about empire, West declined because she had nothing to say “except for the fancy bits on religion and metaphysics that I would throw in in my demented way.” In her demented way, Dillard is content to throw a lot overboard to make room for the metaphysics. But there is nothing desperate, anorexic, or body-denying about her preoccupation with questions of the spirit. In the concluding essay here the quest for the absolute is represented both by a religious ceremony and by an expedition to the North Pole.
Her idea of meta is unashamedly physical. “What’s wrong with golf?” she asks in “How to Live.” “Absolutely nothing.” Well, there’s quite a lot wrong with it, in my view; mainly that it’s not tennis or volleyball. And it is tennis, rather than golf, to which she turns when urging writers to “hit the edges.” I once heard tennis coach Brad Gilbert give similar instructions to one of his protégés. The phrase he shouted out was “Stretch the court!” but that’s another story. Or maybe it is precisely the story. See, you can stretch the court by stripping it of a lot of the clutter required by the novel—all the furniture of character—but the physicality of storytelling must remain strong; must be doubly strong, in fact.
In And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, John Berger—the third point in the British triangle that enabled me, in a most un-Bermuda-like way, to find Dillard—writes that “the traffic between story-telling and metaphysics is continuous.” Here’s a little example of that (foot) traffic from Teaching a Stone to Talk:
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