t if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will liter-ally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get

ts don’t even have to catch their prey: in the spring they swarm over newly hatched, featherless birds in the nest and eat them tiny bite by bite. 8 / Annie Dillard

Meanwhile, the mouse is positively littering the field with its little piles of cut stems into which, presumably, the author of the book is constantly stumbling.

Squirrels, the neighbor-hood children, and I use the downstream fence as a swaying bridge across the creek. But the steers are there today

In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God “set bars and doors” and said, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.” But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?

Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim’s muscles and bones and organs—all but the skin—and through it the giant water bug sucks out the vic-tim’s body, reduced to a juice. T

ut I don’t see what the specialist sees, and so I cut myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the various forms of happiness

The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.

very live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac . But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, “The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest? ” It’s a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an un-thinkable profusion of... See more