Genre: Nature Writing
Size: fifteen short chapters
I recently, for the first time in a long time, had all of my books in one place. I hated it. Piles over piles of books, bitterly unread and frustrating to face. Each book scorning me for my pretentiousness: indeed reading and collecting books are different hobbies, and the latter is a guilty and obvious practice of capitalism. ‘Was it enough to spare you off your misery and low self-esteem?’ they asked me cynically; ‘are we the price for your feeling good?’ But even so, I was there facing them, and my guilty capitalist habit. Or as Jenny from ‘Insert a literary pun’ put it: mindless purchasing, consumerist book fashion. She got over it since she was able to pierce through her pretentiousness and admit her hypocrisy; she has only few years and only a few dozen books to read and bring justice.
I have over hundreds of these scorning titles, collected over half a decade. The thicker ones terrify me more immediately: would I be able to bring them justice? Could I actually finish reading them all and still do them justice? Rereading books is an appealing idea. To go through the pages of a book once again, knowing it offered something the first time, and ‘then some’ on the second reading and so on. That is what doing justice to a book means, right?
In Dillard’s intricately woven book of robust living and fair writing, abundance of the natural kind comes to life – they don’t scorn Dillard, they uplift her. Written over the course of seasons, one could argue, this book is Dillard’s ‘more alive than life itself’ accounts of her days at the offering lands of Tinker Creek. ‘How we live our days is how we live our lives’ was my introduction to Annie Dillard; what is seemingly an obvious observation becomes more urgently true when you think about it. ‘We live in the days’ I remember another poem claiming; if days weren’t there, where should we have lived? A mildly haunting idea. We live in the days and the days gathering become our lives.
Dillard knows this and spends her days mockingly and rebelliously against the modern norms: not working at the 27th floor of a corporate building from 9 to 5 and then some, spending her weekends worrying still over acquisitions, stock prices, and meetings past and future; or as its alter-ego, much like myself these days, ‘slouching over in the bed, depressed by the mundanity of life, resisting movement, let alone proper work, wondering what would become of life, and whether fate exists, and if so, where would it lead him next?’ No. She lives. She lives with lives around her. She goes out every day.
‘If I survive the nights, the days are a pleasure’ she writes; going out she witnesses something that would’ve otherwise gone unseen, unnoticed, wasted, or she is met by something equally as significant, something that would breathe life into her. Beauty and life happen (answer to falling of a tree at the forest question) ‘the least we can do is try to be there’. She lives for the insects, for the plants, for the water creatures whose names she knows by heart, for the changing seasons; once transformed, she lives to write them, declare them, the revelations, the mysteries, the wonders, and the awe.
It’s a book of incredible details; patiently, beautifully, and poetically laid out in such restraint, powerful, and sweeping prose. Although reflections of a life lived in the abundance of nature, ‘for those who can see’ (the Koran) Dillard’s book wears at times a prophetic cloak. Contemplating on the relations of the weird, awe-striking, brutal, beautiful, plenty, various natural lives to our own pale and civilized way of living, Dillard bears striking discontents and urges the insides of the reader towards a world where life is replete, worthy, surpassing ‘meaning’ - a modern escape-term.
Alas, the readers, or a reader, remains chained. It’s also a joy to read: opening this book, the reader is always offered a minutia of wonder, ensuing a great sense of wonder. Yet even when Dillard gets self-involved and obscure, the reader remains intact, listening, attentive not to miss any bit of an insect’s life, a change of weather, or a ponder, that could possibly hold a secret to living. Each of the books I have now somehow put into place holds lives as robust as the creatures of Tinker Creek; would I dare the pilgrimage, or would I continue slouching? ‘Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you’ Dillard dictates as she comes to rescue.
June 18, 2023