Silent All These Years: On Annie Dillard
1.
Some years ago, I attended a conference featuring boldface names and their thoughts on the topic of the essay as art. At 39, I’d written three failed novels, and essays felt like the last form left to me. I was desperate for tips, tricks, and whatever writerly chum they throw to audiences at events like these.
“An essay,” said Philip Lopate on the day of the conference, “is an invitation to think alongside me.”
I jotted his words in a Moleskine notebook and have been turning them over in my head and on the page ever since. The best essays are trips to terra nova, yes; but at heart, all essays depend on a simple sense of camaraderie. From the first word to the last, the writer of an essay is a guide, even if the piece never gets out of first gear. Each essay is a fellowship.
By Lopate’s definition, there’s no better essayist than Annie Dillard. Her thoughts go places no one else can see. Following in her path, you can sip the cold fire of eternity, cheat death in a stunt plane, or trace God’s name in sand, salt, or cloud. She didn’t invent the essay. Her most famous work isn’t classified as an essay. But in the cosmos of essayists, there’s Annie Dillard, and there’s everyone else.
2.
It doesn’t cost more than a couple clicks to get the complete text for Dillard’s piece on witnessing a solar eclipse. If you haven’t read it, you should; if you’ve read it before, reread it. “Total Eclipse” was published 40 years ago, but it’s still wild. I read it for the first time one winter night. I had a good hunch the moon would slip between sun and Earth in the narrative. But I wasn’t prepared for a lunatic opera. By the end of the piece I was like, wait, wait, who is this woman?
Despite being a septuagenarian who cut her teeth on theodicy, Annie Dillard’s name is practically a Twitter hashtag. She gets regular hat tip tweets, often quotations from her first prose book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, or from The Writing Life, her slim but wise book on craft. Writers admire her sleek writing and crisp turns of phrase, but plenty of her fans just love love love her without knowing how to explain why. I’m not sure I can explain why, either; there are too many good reasons.
For one thing, her prose is, her last book of nonfiction. “Hold one of these chert blades to the sky,” she writes, describing an ancient knife made of chiseled stone so fine that “it passes light.” She continues:
