R.I.P. Annie DIllard

I am greatly saddened to hear of the passing of Annie Dillard. Like many people, I approached her work through her Pulitzer Prize-wining book Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. Her writing is so immediate, so visceral, so breathless and urgent in its need to be heard, its need to be understood, but more than anything, for the reader to comprehend and stand dazzled in cosmic disbelief at what she discovered, whatever she pointed us toward.

I went on to read many of her other books like Teaching A Stone To Talk,  For The Time Being, and the beautifully tender and painfully exquisite memoir An American Childhood. She wrote words, sentences, concepts, that made me gasp out loud and cry.

Thank you Annie, for sharing your heart and soul with us. You have enriched humanity and you will be missed.

“What does it feel like to be alive?

Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!

It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.”

― Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

https://www.anniedillard.com/