So, no. With all due respect to human mortality, the sands of time, the pearly gates, the grim reaper, the U.S. census, the proverbial fat lady who sings, the bucket we must all eventually kick and any other end-of-life deities you’d like to invoke — I am going to have to reject the news of Annie Dillard’s death. Thanks, but I’m good. Agree to disagree.
Maybe this is naïve. Maybe it’s the grief talking. But the biographical absence of Annie Dillard does very little to diminish the living presence of Annie Dillard. Because to read her work involves more than just decoding words on a page. It involves sitting, in extremely close contact, with a wild and living thing, a mind-voice — a being that rises out of the text like a murmuration of starlings rises out of a field. To this day, Dillard’s mind-voice remains as real and urgent and alive as the one in our own heads. I keep checking; it’s still there. Open any of her books. Open, say, “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” in which she writes about (among many other things) witnessing a full solar eclipse:
“The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. … This color has never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day.”
See? There it is, still vibrating with the same funky energy, throwing off heat and sparks, channeling big weird truths from other worlds. And channeling is the word. Because when Dillard really gets going she hardly seems to be writing at all. She seems to be taking dictation. She seems to be sitting in some dark crevice behind a sacred mountain, staring into a fire that the rest of us can’t see.
I’ve been marinating in Dillard’s work even more than usual over the last few days — savoring it, underlining my underlinings. As a stylist, she is almost intolerably good. No one wrote sentences like her: dense, musical, punchy, strange. “The old cobblestones were pale humpy ovals like loaves,” she writes about the Pittsburgh streets. She loved to pull words out of their normal slots and plug them back in where they don’t belong, creating little zaps: “The sky is gagging on trees.” She was excellent at similes, and she applied them, as she did everything else, with zero restraint: “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it.”
Sometimes I like to just sit and listen to the internal music of Dillard’s sentences — tiny jingles made of vowels and stops — like I might sit and listen to the radio. This description, for instance, of her grandfather’s legs: “It consisted of many scaly layers of fragile translucency, which together appeared bluish.” Or this one of her childhood rock collection: “One small white wafer had blue stone stars.”