The writer Annie Dillard died this week.
In tribute to her, I first wrote these words now pixilated on your screen in a small notebook, which I carry around like she did in case something catches my attention. I sat under an oak with my back against the trunk, and the first leaves of autumn twirled down from the tree as I recalled Dillard’s words from memory.
Dillard wrote that our lives are a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. Beauty and grace occur all around us; we can hope to choir the proper praise. She wrote that we should wear crash-test helmets to church in case the slumbering God we worship should awaken. She wrote that a schedule defends against chaos but also against whimsy. (Or was that line from Mary Oliver? I think it was Dillard.)
I know Dillard described coming face-to-face with a muskrat and sharing a single mind with the creature.
Dillard though physicists were wild-eyed mystics. She believed in the need to write with the intensity of a dying person. She described a live hawk (or maybe an eagle) that was discovered with the skeleton of a weasel clamped to its neck.
Dillard has an essay about her vivid experience of a total solar eclipse and how there was screaming among her fellow viewers as the darkness descended over the land like the lid of a coffin being closed. At least, I remember such a feeling of dread from the essay, whether Dillard used that simile about a coffin or not.
Later today, I’ll dip into my dog-eared, heavily underlined copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard’s memoir-like account of exploring the woods by day and night. There’s not one lazy sentence in the whole book.
For now, I sit outside and give thanks for her words and her practice of writing. I carry around a notebook and pen, but I rarely write with the tenacity of that weasel clinging to the hawk’s neck. But Annie Dillard still taught me about paying fierce, holy attention—she called it “stalking.” And that’s why, earlier today before I had learned of her death, I squatted on the hiking trail to peer into the tiny, beady eyes of a box turtle who, regarding my monstrous form, tucked her head into the safety of her beautiful shell.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of the book with Wipf and Stock Publishers titled This Is the Day: A Year of Observing Unofficial Holidays about Ampersands, Bobbleheads, Buttons, Cousins, Hairball Awareness, Humbugs, Serendipity, Star Wars, Teenagers, Tenderness, Walking to School, Yo-Yos, and More. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he is a student of joy.
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