Annie Dillard’s Impossible Pages

So I came back to read these essays again, a third time. I know I am obsessing, but some things merit study and consideration. I smiled at this:

"There is much I love. Because the world is so astonishing, the snails — to take just one of the many possible examples — are so short, and it is all too great for me to think about alone. Or at all...

And a good morning it may be. Many are."

That sums up my present life in a snail shell. Cheers.

ADs work has meant more to me, perhaps, than most anything else I have read in my long life of reading, at 78 years of age. "Pilgrim" (my first exposure) is an amazing, transcendental song that yet, in her unique way, also brings one down to earth with the complex details of reality. Her beautiful, last in the volume, short story "Aces and Eights", from the "Teaching a Stone" collection is something I cannot re-read, as I often do, without a lump in my throat. Any reader that has not read AD has truly missed one of the best experiences of an intellectual life.

I just read through these a second time. I find pleasure in reading dense, chewy word constructions, almost regardless of subject. But I admire even more a perfectly spare, parsimonious use of language. That is, I admire it (and envy the skill of the writer) when it is done well. Unfortunately, such skillful minimalism is a rare thing. Ms. Dillard's pieces are of the former sort, and as exquisite as they are I cannot place them above the more prosaic forms she seeminly disparages. I disagree with her statement that "Writing is too hard to waste on the weirdness of your daily life." Some of my favorite writing is about the mundane. A truly adept writer can make anything engaging and new.

The short-essay form is an exercise in concision. It tests a writer's editing skills (that necessary willingness to "kill your children"). Ms. Dillard took this to the extreme when she formed her pared-down novel "The Maytrees" (reportedly the product of a manuscript from which every unnecessary word was subtracted). I didn't think the rabid red pencil worked well there, but it does in these essays. They are a joy to read.

(There are certain words, metaphors and synonyms that almost always raise my hackles. Likening something to dancing is one -- and yes, I have done that myself. For me it is in the same class as "journey." Or saying something is "amazing." When I read I want the new and the fresh, not the hackneyed.)

"Pilgrim" and "Childhood" are two of my favorite reads of all time and Dillard is one of my favorite authors. Her prose is simple, complex, dry, poignant, fascinating, infuriating, funny, humbling and a voice unlike any other writer. I have learned and been enriched so much about the beauty and horror of the world from her writing. What an adventure, which is why I read.

The photograph by Raymond Meeks is fabulous. Thank you for this article - I had somehow not been aware of the existence of this rare gem of a poetess, writer, seer, imaginer.

What a range of knowledge at such a young age.
Her delight in mundane details invokes to me . . . Samuel Beckett!

I’m one of the many who had a crush on Annie at Wesleyan where she was my professor.

I’m also one of the few — perhaps the only — on whose writing assignment she scribbled, “This is SO bad it makes me want to quit teaching.”

Thirty-five years later and I’m still trying to please her.

But what’s with this flurry of activity? For years, I’ve waited for Annie to show up next door at Dartmouth and read an obscure poem only she understands, or perhaps she would break down on my dirt road while hunting for a rare loon, and I would be out walking my Basset and — voila! -- how's Phyllis Rose?

Now all of a sudden Annie’s showing up in the pages of The New York Times and some other magazine for Poets and Writers. What’s next? A NASCAR endorsement?

Something’s up. And I want to know what it is.

This, compared to politics, is like licking already melting, sweet and creamy ice cream, rather than dying of thirst in the arctic with one's tongue stuck on the block of a nearly motionless glacier.

"Teaching a Stone to Talk" was the first book I ever threw at the wall (speaking of one who loves to throw many things) because I was so annoyed that she'd written everything down first, and perfectly. She's a mad poet who happens to assemble her work in the form of prose. I adore her.

Compliments to photographer Raymond Meeks for that remarkable portrait. It's a refreshing departure from the dour, deep-thoughts author portraits we so often see. And it is very much in keeping with the spirit of Ms. Dillard's work.

It is always a joy to hear from the weird, wonderful Ms. Dillard! In any of her work you can find something that sticks in your head and just stays there, forever, like a mantra.

Annie Dilllard remains for me, along with Joan Didion, one of the most important American prose writers of our time. Her An American Childhood and The Writing Life not only capture what it means to be young and ambitious in America, but serve as a primer on good writing itself. Her use of rhythm is just as astonishing as her use of metaphor and descriptions--yet, like Didion, her work is highly accessible and easy to connect with. I love that her early essays are featured here!

"Possible books abound; I’d rather write an impossible page."