#annie dillard

[apocryphics]

Annie Dillard

[petrichara]

Thinking about Annie Dillard’s “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives” and Joan Didion’s “Every day is all there is.”

Thinking about Mary Oliver’s "Each of us is given only so many mornings to do it — to look around and love” and Ilya Kaminsky’s “Is it foolish to speak of little joys that occur in the middle of tragedy? It is our humanity. Whatever we have left of it. We must not deny it to ourselves.”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[dk-thrive]

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? 

― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (Harper & Row, 1989)

[ponyatowski]

In his old age, James McNeill Whistler used to walk down to the Atlantic shore carrying a few thin planks and his paints. On the planks he painted, day after day, in broad, blurred washes representing sky, water, and shore, three blurry light-filled stripes. These are late Whistlers; I like them very much. In the high Arctic I thought of them, for I seemed to be standing in one of them. If I loosed my eyes from my shoes, the gravel at my feet, or the chaos of ice at the shore, I saw what newborn babies must see: nothing but senseless variations of light on the retinas. The world was a color-field painting wrapped round me at an unknown distance;

James McNeill Whistler- various seascapes from 1893-1900 //Annie Dillard, An Expedition to the Pole

[nobeerreviews]

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

-- Annie Dillard

(Nice, France)

[iscariotapologist]

Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

[catilinas]

The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves at 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed - 1,800 miles an hour. It was 195 miles wide. No end was in sight - you saw only the edge. It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it. Seeing it, and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of anaesthetic shoot up your arm. If you think very fast, you may have time to think, 'Soon it will hit my brain.' You can feel the deadness race up your arm; you can feel the appalling, inhuman speed of your own blood. We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit. This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorised speeds.

Annie Dillard, Total Eclipse