dailydillard

[dailydillard]

The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God. The mind's sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy. The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse," Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982

[dailydillard]

We were the world's dead people, rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet's crust, while the earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything. Only an extraordinary act of will could recall us to our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. We got the light wrong. In the sky was something that should not be there. In the black sky was a ring of light. It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone. There were stars. It was all over.

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse," Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982

[dailydillard]

No use running to tell anyone. Significant as it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance. This is all I have to tell you.

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse," Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982

[dailydillard]

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we have forgotten we ever learned it. Yet it is a transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add--until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse," Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982

[dailydillard]

It was a though an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the earth's face.

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse," Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982

[dailydillard]

Photographs of the Crab Nebula taken fifteen years ago are identical to photographs of it taken yesterday. Some lichens are similar. Botanists have measured some ordinary lichens twice, at fifty-year intervals, without detecting any growth at all. And yet their cells divide; they live. The small ring of light was like these things--like a ridiculous lichen up in the sky, like a perfectly still explosion 4,200 light years away: it was interesting, and lovely, and in witless motion, and it had nothing to do with anything.

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse," Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982

[dailydillard]

One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk a half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.

Annie Dillard, "Living Like Weasels," Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982

[dailydillard]

From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse," Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982

[dailydillard]

What you see in an eclipse is entirely different from what you know.

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse," Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982

[dailydillard]

All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind--the culture--has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclispe," Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982

[dailydillard]

The restaurant was a halfway house, a decompression chamber.

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse," Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982

[dailydillard]

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Some of these have not been published before; others [...] were published obscurely. At any rate, this is not a collection of occasional pieces, such as a writer brings out to supplement his real work; instead this is my real work, such as it is.

Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982

[dailydillard]

Robert D. Richardson on Annie Dillard

Here’s his answer to how being married to Annie Dillard changed his writing:

What changed? Everything. I could write a book, but I won’t. I learned from her that you have to go all out every day, every piece. Hold nothing back, the well will refill. She gave me the key to Emerson in one word: Wild. Emerson is wild. I also learned you don’t have to write every day, but you have to go in the room with the piece every day. She told me she looked at submissions from her students for any two words together that she’d never seen together. And finally, I learned I needed to read more. I read maybe 50 books a year that are not part of what I’m writing. She reads many times that. Most days, I’m not even good enough to get into one of her classes.

[dailydillard]

Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter. Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week Christ washes the disciples’ dirty feet, handles their very toes, and repeats, It is all right—believe it or not—to be people.

Who can believe it?

Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

[dailydillard]

My fingers were stiff and red with cold, and my nose ran. I had forgotten the Law of the Wild, which is "Carry Kleenex."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974

[dailydillard]

Outside in summer I watch the orb-weavers, the spiders at their wheels. Last summer I watched one spin her web, which was especially interesting because the light just happened to be such that I couldn't see the web at all. I read that spiders lay their major straight lines with fluid that isn't sticky, and then lay a nonsticky spiral. Then they walk along that safe road and lay a sticky spiral going the other way. It seems to be very much a matter of concentration. The spider I watched was a matter of mystery: she seemed to be scrambling up, down, and across the air. There was a small white mass of silk visible at the center of the orb, and she returned to this hub after each frenzied foray between air and air. It was a sort of Tinker Creek to her, from which she bore lightly in every direction an invisible news.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974

[dailydillard]

“One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief.”

-Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse”