Annie Dillard Tribute
Annie Dillard taught me that writing was a place where one went to be stripped of the unnecessary. She had no patience for the decorative lie, padded sentence, or little consolations writers sometimes scatter around as cushions for the reader. She made you look. Again. Attentively. At the hawk, creek, mosquito, monastery, the dead… the terrible machinery of consciousness. She made attention almost feral, if not at all.
“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
The passage from The Writing Life has stayed with me because Dillard understood something about writing that I have spent years circling myself: sooner or later, every reader is a terminal patient. Both the audience and the writer are already dying. The book is dying in the hand even as it is being read. So what business have we with bloodlessness? She said write as if you were dying and we thought she meant urgency. What can possibly justify wounding another vein for the enormous human noise unless the writing has looked into the dark and found a mine fault there worth disturbing us with?
You came to her expecting nature writing, a woman with a notebook by Tinker Creek, and she gave you that, yes, but underneath the muskrats and the mockingbird’s free fall was a theology so exacting it made most introspection worth the tourism. She was interested in waking you up, which is a much older and much less polite form of love.
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I think of her instruction to write for an audience of terminal patients, and I understand now that she knew that triviality is the one unforgivable sin against a person running out of time who has no patience left for hedging, throat-clearing, and safe little coffins designed to offend no one and move no one. She asked writers to earn the attention of someone who has nothing left to spend. Most of us never manage it. She did, book after book, impossibly, for fifty years.
She was a difficult writer just as a mountain is a difficult walk. The view she was taking you to could not be reached by an easier road. You had to slow down for her. You had to read a paragraph twice, sometimes three times, and in that second or third reading, you would open what had been shut a long while. That is instruction in how to see, which is a rarer gift and a heavier one to give.
Dillard was one of my most influential women writers. She did not make literature easy for either of us. She did not spoon-feed wonder. She sharpened it. Reading her was work, yes, but a range of work that makes you suspicious of your previous eyesight. You came away from her books having no new eyes, merely, only the unsettling knowledge that you lit the torch of threshing fluff.
Annie Dillard was a force. She taught me that attention is a form of moral seriousness and the world is sufficiently deranged without our having to embellish it. I try to make my writing risk its own neck just as she refused the easy way, and so, brilliantly, she made the difficult way beautiful.
Rest in your light, dani Annie.
