Sublime

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

In these short essays, Annie Dillard – the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood – illuminates the dedication, absurdity, and daring that characterize the existence of a writer. A moving account of Dillard’s own experiences while writing her works, The Writing Life offers deep insight into one... See more

Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in an hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes

... See more

This August, the summer I was ten, we returned from the Lake and found our shared room uncannily tidy and stilled, dark, while summer, the summer in which we had been immersed, played outside the closed windows like a movie. So it always was, those first few minutes in an emptied room. They made you self-conscious; you felt yourself living your

... See more

of the eye, each augenblick, as a muskrat dives, a heron takes alarm, a leaf floats spinning away. There is death in the pot for the living’s food, fly-blown meat, muddy salt, and plucked herbs bitter as squill. If you can get it. How many people have prayed for their daily bread and famished? They die their daily death as utterly as did the frog,

... See more

To be alive, she says, is to 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

... See more

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air,

... See more

it.

“When you open a book,” the sentimental library posters said, “anything can happen.” This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked.

... See more