Annie Dillard spent her life examining the extraordinary mysteries hiding inside ordinary existence. Her passing reminds me that the greatest writers don't simply teach us how to read the world. They force us to confront how little of it we've actually bothered to see.
There is something profoundly unsettling about losing a writer who spent her entire life reminding us that everything was temporary in the first place. It's almost as though death, that arrogant bastard, decided to interrupt a conversation about its own inevitability. And in the case of Annie Dillard, the irony is particularly cruel because few writers understood the strange relationship between life, suffering, beauty, and mortality quite like she did.
Annie Dillard died on September 15, 2026, at the age of 81. The world lost a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, an extraordinary essayist, a fearless intellectual, and a woman who possessed the increasingly endangered ability to look at something ordinary and recognize that it was anything but.
I look around at the modern world, with its endless commentary, manufactured outrage, technological distractions, and people desperately competing to have their opinions noticed, and I find myself wondering whether we've become so obsessed with expressing ourselves that we've forgotten how to observe anything.
Everybody wants to be heard. Almost nobody wants to listen.
Everybody wants to explain the universe. Almost nobody wants to sit quietly long enough to recognize that the universe owes us no explanation.
Dillard understood something that our culture seems determined to forget: wisdom is not necessarily the accumulation of answers. Sometimes it is the courage to remain in the presence of questions that refuse to surrender their mysteries.
And that, to me, is what made her extraordinary.
Not simply her intelligence, although she possessed plenty of it. Not merely her prose, although she could construct sentences that made language feel newly invented. What distinguished Dillard was her willingness to confront existence without demanding that it flatter humanity.
She saw beauty without pretending that beauty eliminated suffering. She encountered cruelty without concluding that cruelty made wonder impossible. She understood that the natural world existed independently of our moral preferences, and that genuine attention required something more demanding than admiration.
It required humility.
And humility, particularly in a civilization convinced that possessing something and understanding it are essentially the same activity, might be the rarest intellectual achievement of all.
The Woman Who Refused to Look Away
Born Meta Ann Doak in Pittsburgh in 1945, Annie Dillard developed the sort of curiosity that would eventually make her one of the most remarkable literary voices of the twentieth century.
Her intellectual appetite was enormous. She was fascinated by insects, landscapes, religion, science, art, and the complicated machinery of consciousness. Where most people saw a pond, she saw an entire civilization operating according to rules that humans could observe but never fully control.
In 1974, at just 28 years old, she published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the book that would establish her reputation and earn the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1975.
Consider that achievement for a moment.
At an age when many people are still trying to figure out who they are, Dillard produced a work that asked what it meant for anything to exist at all.
The book grew out of her observations of the natural world surrounding Tinker Creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. Yet calling it nature writing feels inadequate, almost insulting in its simplicity.
It was philosophy disguised as observation. Theology disguised as wandering. An investigation into existence conducted through frogs, insects, trees, water, sunlight, and the occasional terrifying reminder that nature has absolutely no obligation to behave according to human expectations.
What fascinates me most about Dillard is that she refused to sentimentalize the world.
We have developed a peculiar habit of treating nature as though it were a therapeutic service provided for human emotional convenience. We photograph sunsets, admire mountains, celebrate flowers, and construct entire philosophies around the reassuring idea that everything happens for a reason.
Then a predator tears apart something beautiful, disease destroys an innocent life, or catastrophe interrupts our comfortable understanding of cosmic justice, and suddenly we struggle to reconcile reality with the comforting story we've been telling ourselves.
Dillard never needed nature to be kind in order to find it magnificent.
That distinction matters.
It suggests that reverence does not require illusion. We can respect something without pretending to understand it. We can recognize beauty without insisting that the universe has been organized around our happiness.
I find that perspective liberating because it challenges the extraordinary arrogance buried inside so much modern thinking.
We behave as though existence is supposed to make sense to us.
Dillard understood that our inability to comprehend something does not constitute evidence that something is meaningless.
Sometimes it simply means that our imagination is smaller than reality.
The World Was Sacred Long Before We Learned to Put a Price on It
One of the things I appreciate most about Dillard's writing is the way it challenges the assumption that the natural world exists primarily as material for human consumption.
We live inside an economic system that has become extraordinarily skilled at assigning prices to things while remaining embarrassingly incompetent at recognizing their value.
A forest becomes timber. A river becomes a development opportunity. Land becomes real estate. Animals become inventory. Human time becomes productivity.
Everything must justify its existence through usefulness, profitability, or convenience.
And anything that cannot be monetized is increasingly treated as though it has no legitimate reason to exist.
I find this philosophy both intellectually impoverished and spiritually destructive.
Across many African traditions, the relationship between humanity and the natural world has been understood through concepts of interdependence, ancestry, responsibility, and continuity. These traditions are diverse, and I would never pretend that an entire continent shares one philosophy. Nevertheless, many preserve an understanding that human beings are participants in a living network of relationships rather than absolute rulers standing outside it.
The land is not merely property. It carries memory.
Water is not simply a resource. It sustains communities, histories, ceremonies, and generations that have yet to be born.
The dead are not always regarded as having vanished from relevance. Their influence survives through the lives, responsibilities, and moral decisions of those who remain.
Reading Dillard through this understanding reveals something especially compelling.
She approached the natural world as something worthy of profound attention without requiring it to become human.
She recognized that existence possessed significance before she arrived to describe it.
And I believe this challenges one of the central failures of modern civilization: our tendency to confuse dominion with understanding.
Just because we can manipulate something does not mean we comprehend it. Just because we can destroy something does not mean we possess the wisdom necessary to replace it.
There is an enormous difference between having power over the world and knowing how to live responsibly within it.
Dillard's writing repeatedly brought me back to that distinction.
She understood that the world was not an empty stage awaiting the appearance of humanity. It was already alive with processes, relationships, mysteries, and histories that existed independently of our ambitions.
Perhaps one of the most important things a person can learn is that everything meaningful does not have to revolve around them.
For a species that has managed to make itself the protagonist of practically every story, that realization is almost revolutionary.
Paying Attention Is a Moral Responsibility
I've become increasingly convinced that one of the greatest crises of modern life is not simply misinformation, ignorance, or political division.
It is the collapse of sustained attention.
We consume enormous quantities of information while understanding remarkably little of what passes before us. We read headlines instead of arguments, collect opinions instead of evidence, and mistake immediate emotional reactions for considered judgment.
Our technological systems reward speed, certainty, visibility, and repetition.
Careful observation, by comparison, is painfully inefficient.
It requires patience. It demands intellectual discipline. It obliges us to tolerate the uncomfortable possibility that our first interpretation might be wrong.
Dillard built an entire literary philosophy around refusing to rush past the world.
She observed the extraordinary events occurring inside ordinary landscapes because she understood that significance is not always announced through spectacle.
Sometimes the smallest thing deserves the greatest attention.
I think about this whenever I consider the intellectual traditions of Black writers who understood that observation could be an act of resistance.
Consider Zora Neale Hurston, whose work preserved the voices, customs, language, and experiences of people whom dominant cultural institutions frequently dismissed as unworthy of serious literary consideration.
Hurston recognized that the ordinary lives of Black communities contained intellectual and cultural richness that did not require validation from those who had historically denied their humanity.
Or consider James Baldwin, whose penetrating observations of American society revealed contradictions that many people preferred not to acknowledge.
Baldwin understood that seeing clearly was not always a pleasant experience. Sometimes understanding required dismantling the comforting stories through which entire societies protected themselves from moral accountability.
Dillard's concerns were different, and their historical experiences should not be flattened into false equivalence.
Yet I recognize a shared commitment to the transformative power of attention.
Hurston insisted that overlooked human experiences deserved to be documented.
Baldwin insisted that concealed social realities deserved to be confronted.
Dillard insisted that the overlooked mysteries of existence deserved to be examined.
Each, in a different way, challenged the assumption that reality becomes insignificant merely because people have learned to ignore it.
And that is a lesson I find increasingly urgent.
Because what we refuse to notice does not disappear.
It simply continues shaping the world without our understanding.
Beauty Is Not Innocence
There is a particular kind of dishonesty that emerges whenever people discuss the beauty of existence as though suffering were an unfortunate exception to an otherwise benevolent arrangement.
I understand why we do it.
Nobody wants to believe that tragedy, violence, decay, and destruction are woven into the same natural processes that produce growth, renewal, and astonishing beauty.
We want goodness to be rewarded, innocence to be protected, and suffering to arrive accompanied by an explanation.
But history has never operated according to those expectations.
Neither has nature.
One of the most memorable moments in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek involves Dillard watching a frog being consumed by a giant water bug. The scene is disturbing precisely because it takes place within the same landscape that inspires her deepest expressions of wonder.
There is no comforting separation between the beautiful and the horrifying.
They inhabit the same world.
I find that observation particularly powerful when considered alongside the historical experiences of people who have had to preserve their humanity under conditions that offered very little evidence of justice.
The survival of African peoples through enslavement, colonial domination, displacement, and institutional violence did not depend upon pretending that suffering was imaginary.
It required confronting realities that were often unspeakably cruel while continuing to create music, literature, family traditions, spiritual practices, political movements, and visions of freedom.
Beauty emerged not because suffering was desirable, but because suffering failed to extinguish the human capacity to create meaning.
That distinction is essential.
I reject the sentimental philosophy that attempts to justify oppression by celebrating the resilience of those who endured it.
Suffering is not redeemed merely because someone survives beautifully.
Injustice does not become acceptable because its victims produce extraordinary art.
And tragedy does not transform into a blessing simply because people discover strength in its aftermath.
Dillard's confrontation with nature's cruelty reminds me that honest reverence requires acknowledging the world as it exists, not as we would prefer it to be.
There is room for wonder without denial.
There is room for gratitude without pretending that everything is fair.
And there is room for spiritual depth without requiring every painful experience to conceal a reassuring lesson.
Sometimes suffering is simply suffering.
Our responsibility is not to romanticize it, but to determine how we will respond.
The Dangerous Arrogance of Thinking We Own Everything
If there is one characteristic of modern civilization that continually astonishes me, it is our ability to confuse technological sophistication with moral advancement.
We can communicate across continents instantaneously, observe distant galaxies, manipulate genetic material, and build machines capable of performing increasingly complex intellectual tasks.
Yet we remain astonishingly primitive when confronting questions of greed, inequality, cruelty, responsibility, and power.
We know how to extract more.
We have not necessarily learned when to stop.
We know how to accelerate production.
We are less certain about what deserves to be produced.
We know how to measure economic growth.
We struggle to agree upon what constitutes a life worth living.
Reading Dillard reminds me that human intelligence becomes dangerous when it loses its relationship with humility.
Her writing resisted the assumption that everything unfamiliar must be subdued, classified, converted into property, or transformed into an instrument of human convenience.
And that resistance carries profound implications beyond environmental philosophy.
The same mentality that reduces landscapes to commodities can reduce human beings to labor, communities to markets, and cultures to products.
Once we accept that value exists only through utility, the moral boundaries become disturbingly flexible.
A person matters because of what they produce.
An elder matters only while economically independent.
A child matters as future labor.
A forest matters as commercial timber.
A community matters as a consumer demographic.
Everything becomes useful, and usefulness gradually replaces dignity.
I cannot accept that as an adequate philosophy of existence.
The idea of collective responsibility found in many African moral traditions offers another possibility: that individuals are shaped by their relationships and possess obligations extending beyond immediate personal advantage.
This does not erase individuality. It recognizes that individuality develops within a larger human community.
Dillard's attention to the interdependence of living things reinforces this broader understanding.
Nothing exists entirely by itself.
Even solitude depends upon relationships we rarely acknowledge: the air we breathe, the soil beneath us, the ecological systems sustaining our bodies, and the generations whose knowledge made our lives possible.
The fantasy of complete independence is precisely that: a fantasy.
We are not isolated sovereign beings who occasionally interact with the world.
We are expressions of a world that existed before us and will continue after us.
A Writer Who Understood That Language Should Disturb Us
Annie Dillard was not simply a gifted observer. She was a formidable craftswoman who understood that writing required discipline far beyond the ability to arrange attractive sentences.
Her 1989 book The Writing Life explored the demanding, frequently frustrating process through which writers confront their own limitations.
What interests me most about her philosophy is the seriousness with which she approached language.
She did not treat writing as a decorative activity intended to make ordinary thoughts sound impressive.
She treated it as a method of discovering what she did not yet understand.
I wish more people approached language that way.
We have entered an era in which words are manufactured at extraordinary speed, frequently without the inconvenience of reflection.
People produce opinions before investigating their foundations. They construct arguments designed to confirm identities rather than challenge assumptions. They use sophisticated vocabulary to conceal remarkably ordinary thinking.
Sometimes the entire purpose of language seems to be avoiding the responsibility of thought.
Dillard represented the opposite impulse.
For her, writing demanded immersion, precision, revision, and a willingness to abandon sentences that failed to illuminate the underlying experience.
That approach resonates deeply with my understanding of storytelling as something more substantial than entertainment.
Throughout African and African diasporic cultures, oral histories, proverbs, music, poetry, and storytelling have served as instruments for preserving knowledge and transmitting moral understanding across generations.
A story can carry information that official institutions neglect or deliberately suppress.
A proverb can preserve generations of observation within a handful of words.
A song can communicate historical grief while simultaneously asserting that a community remains alive.
Language, in these traditions, is not merely a tool for individual expression.
It is also a vessel of collective memory.
That is why I find careless language so troubling.
Words influence the boundaries of what societies consider imaginable, acceptable, and true.
When people are repeatedly described as inferior, threatening, disposable, or undeserving, those descriptions can become the intellectual architecture through which their mistreatment is rationalized.
And when language becomes sufficiently dishonest, entire civilizations can learn to participate in cruelty while convincing themselves they are behaving reasonably.
Dillard's insistence upon precision offers a necessary counterweight.
Look carefully.
Think honestly.
Write deliberately.
And never mistake the elegance of a sentence for the truth of the idea it contains.
Why Solitude Frightens Us So Much
One of the more revealing contradictions of contemporary society is that we celebrate individuality while constructing an environment in which people are increasingly uncomfortable being alone with themselves.
We are surrounded by devices that promise connection but frequently deliver distraction.
Silence has become something to eliminate.
Waiting has become something to endure.
And boredom, once an ordinary condition of human existence, is increasingly regarded as a problem requiring immediate technological intervention.
I sometimes wonder what Annie Dillard would make of a world in which millions of people struggle to observe their surroundings without periodically checking a screen.
Her writing emerged from a commitment to contemplation that seems almost rebellious today.
She understood that attention cannot develop fully when consciousness is constantly being interrupted.
But solitude, in her work, was not necessarily an escape from responsibility.
It was an opportunity to encounter reality without the endless interference of social performance.
That distinction matters to me because there is a profound difference between being alone and being disconnected.
One can withdraw temporarily from the noise of society while remaining deeply conscious of obligations to others.
Indeed, periods of contemplation may make those obligations more visible.
Within many African spiritual and philosophical traditions, wisdom is not merely an individual possession. It becomes meaningful through how it is lived, shared, and placed in service of communal well-being.
An elder is respected not simply for accumulating years, but for the understanding those years may have produced and the guidance that understanding can offer.
Knowledge carries responsibility.
And I believe solitude can contribute to that responsibility when it enables a person to return to the world with greater clarity.
The problem arises when reflection becomes self-absorption, or when spiritual language becomes an excuse for ignoring the conditions under which other people must live.
I do not admire detachment that mistakes indifference for enlightenment.
The purpose of seeing more clearly should not be to become less human.
It should be to become more attentive to the lives, struggles, and possibilities surrounding us.
Dillard's example reminds me that contemplation is valuable precisely because the world deserves more than our distracted participation.
The Writers We Celebrate and the Writers We Overlook
Whenever an extraordinary writer dies, we inevitably revisit the question of literary greatness.
Who deserves to be remembered?
Whose work belongs in classrooms?
Which voices are regarded as universal, and which are confined to categories defined by identity, geography, or historical circumstance?
These questions matter because literary reputations do not develop in a cultural vacuum.
They are shaped by publishers, universities, reviewers, educational institutions, commercial markets, and generations of assumptions about whose experiences deserve intellectual authority.
Dillard unquestionably earned her place among the finest American prose writers of her generation.
Her Pulitzer Prize, enormous influence, and enduring readership reflect a body of work that challenged people to examine reality with extraordinary intensity.
But celebrating her also reminds me how important it is to broaden our understanding of greatness rather than treating literary excellence as though it belongs to one cultural inheritance.
When I think about writers who expanded the boundaries of American consciousness, I cannot separate Dillard's meditations on existence from Toni Morrison's investigations of memory, history, identity, and the lasting consequences of violence.
Morrison understood that the past is never merely finished. It survives in language, relationships, institutions, and the emotional inheritance of generations.
Likewise, I think about Alice Walker's attention to the intimate consequences of historical inequality and her insistence that neglected lives contain profound moral complexity.
And I think about Baldwin's devastating ability to expose the distance between America's declared values and its actual behavior.
These writers did not pursue identical artistic projects.
That is precisely why placing them within a broader literary conversation matters.
Greatness does not require sameness.
A civilization becomes intellectually richer when it recognizes that understanding existence requires more than one perspective.
Dillard revealed mysteries embedded in the natural world.
Morrison confronted histories that societies attempted to bury.
Baldwin exposed the psychological and political contradictions sustaining injustice.
Hurston preserved cultural experiences that dominant institutions too often dismissed.
Each expanded the territory of human understanding.
And each reminds me that the literary canon should not function as a private club whose membership remains permanently determined by the preferences of earlier generations.
If literature has any meaningful purpose, surely it must include enlarging our capacity to recognize experiences beyond our own.
Otherwise, we are not studying humanity.
We are merely studying the portions of humanity that institutions once decided mattered most.
The Spiritual Courage to Live Without Easy Answers
What makes Dillard's writing especially compelling is her refusal to reduce existence to a tidy theological explanation.
She was fascinated by spiritual questions, but her fascination did not always produce comfort.
She encountered beauty and destruction existing side by side and recognized that neither could be honestly ignored.
To me, that is a more serious engagement with spiritual life than the convenient certainty offered by those who claim to know exactly why everything happens.
There is a difference between faith and the refusal to question.
There is a difference between conviction and arrogance.
And there is a difference between seeking meaning and manufacturing explanations that protect us from uncertainty.
I have always found it strange how frequently people assume that a meaningful life requires absolute certainty about the universe.
Why should that be true?
Why should mystery diminish significance?
We do not need to understand every mechanism of consciousness to recognize the importance of human dignity.
We do not need to resolve every theological contradiction before acknowledging our obligations to one another.
And we certainly do not need a complete explanation of existence before developing gratitude for the astonishing improbability of being alive.
Many African spiritual systems have historically understood existence through relationships among the visible and invisible, the living and ancestral, the human and natural.
Their diversity resists easy generalization, but many take seriously the possibility that reality exceeds what immediate observation can capture.
Dillard's spiritual inquiry approaches a related boundary from her own intellectual and religious context.
She recognized that our senses reveal extraordinary things while simultaneously reminding us of everything they cannot disclose.
That awareness should encourage curiosity rather than intellectual surrender.
The unknown is not necessarily a threat.
Sometimes it is an invitation.
And perhaps the greatest tragedy of rigid certainty is that it closes the mind precisely where discovery could begin.
Mortality Has a Way of Correcting Our Priorities
When someone like Annie Dillard dies, I find myself thinking less about death as an event and more about the peculiar manner in which we organize our lives around pretending it will never happen.
We postpone important conversations.
We delay creative ambitions.
We tolerate relationships that diminish us because the familiar feels safer than the uncertain.
We spend extraordinary amounts of time managing appearances for people whose opinions will have almost no lasting influence upon our lives.
And we convince ourselves that genuine living will begin once we have accumulated enough money, security, recognition, or certainty.
The tragedy is that life does not exist somewhere beyond the interruptions.
It is happening during them.
Dillard understood that mortality was not an abstract philosophical concept detached from ordinary existence.
Death was woven into the very landscape she observed.
Every creature existed within a process of emergence, transformation, and disappearance.
And human beings, despite our intelligence and enormous capacity for self-importance, remained participants in that process.
I find something strangely comforting in this realization.
Not because death is desirable, or because grief becomes less painful when we explain it philosophically.
It doesn't.
But because acknowledging our impermanence can clarify what deserves our attention.
What do we owe the people who share this brief existence with us?
What responsibilities do we carry toward those who lived before us?
What kind of world are we preparing for those who will arrive after we are gone?
These questions become especially urgent when I think about legacy.
In many communities shaped by displacement, historical erasure, and struggles for self-determination, remembrance has never been a trivial matter.
To preserve a name, a language, a family history, or a cultural practice can become an act of resistance against forces that attempted to make entire peoples disappear from the historical record.
Memory is not simply nostalgia.
It can be a declaration that existence mattered.
Dillard leaves behind a different but equally important kind of testimony.
Her books preserve the record of a consciousness that refused to pass through the world without examining it.
And that, perhaps, is one of the most meaningful forms of immortality available to a writer.
Not escaping death.
But leaving behind a way of seeing that continues to influence the living.
What Annie Dillard Leaves Behind
I do not think the greatest tribute we can offer Annie Dillard is simply to praise her intelligence or place her books among the accomplishments of American literature.
Those things are deserved, but they are insufficient.
The more meaningful tribute would be to practice the kind of attention her work demanded.
To examine the ordinary without dismissing it.
To resist the assumption that familiarity constitutes understanding.
To question explanations that seem suspiciously designed to preserve our comfort.
To recognize that beauty and suffering can coexist without either cancelling the other.
And to remember that intellectual sophistication means very little if it produces neither humility nor responsibility.
Dillard's passing arrives at a moment when society seems increasingly committed to replacing reflection with reaction.
We are encouraged to develop opinions about everything while devoting serious attention to almost nothing.
We reward confidence even when it is unsupported.
We confuse public visibility with importance.
And we continually surrender our capacity for wonder to systems engineered to keep us consuming.
Against that backdrop, her life's work feels less like a literary accomplishment from another era and more like a necessary warning.
Pay attention to what is happening around you.
Notice the people society has taught you to overlook.
Recognize the living systems that sustain your existence.
Question the stories that make exploitation seem natural and indifference seem reasonable.
Understand that knowledge without wisdom can become another instrument of destruction.
And never allow the machinery of modern life to convince you that being constantly occupied is the same as being fully alive.
For me, this is where Dillard's legacy meets a much larger human obligation.
The capacity to observe should deepen our capacity to care.
Our encounter with the natural world should challenge the arrogance that permits us to exploit it without restraint.
Our understanding of mortality should strengthen our commitments to the generations who will inherit the consequences of our decisions.
And our engagement with literature should expand our understanding of humanity rather than reinforce the narrow boundaries of our existing experience.
Dillard offered no comprehensive solution to the contradictions of existence.
That was never her responsibility.
What she offered was something considerably more valuable: an example of what happens when a human being refuses to surrender curiosity, refuses to abandon complexity, and refuses to mistake the limitations of personal understanding for the limitations of reality itself.
A Final Thought: The World Doesn't Need More People Who Have All the Answers
Annie Dillard was one of the greatest writers of her generation because she understood that the universe was not waiting for her to explain it.
It was already happening.
Magnificently, violently, mysteriously, indifferently.
And somewhere inside that incomprehensible unfolding, human beings had been granted the extraordinary ability to notice.
I find that thought more profound than any promise of certainty.
Because perhaps the real measure of intelligence is not how confidently we declare what the world means, but how carefully we approach everything we have yet to understand.
Perhaps wisdom begins when we stop treating existence as a possession and start recognizing it as a relationship.
Perhaps genuine reverence requires us to abandon the fantasy that humanity stands above everything else.
And perhaps a meaningful life is not one in which we accumulate the greatest number of experiences, but one in which we learn to encounter our experiences with greater depth.
Annie Dillard spent her life showing us that a creek could contain a universe, that an insect could disturb an entire philosophy, and that an ordinary afternoon could become an encounter with questions humanity has struggled to answer for thousands of years.
She did not need the world to be simple.
She needed it to be worth examining.
And it was.
I think about how much of our existence we surrender to distractions that will not matter tomorrow, arguments that will not survive the week, and ambitions that may leave us spiritually impoverished even when they make us materially successful.
Then I think about a woman standing beside a creek, watching something most people would walk past without noticing, and discovering enough meaning in that small encounter to change the way generations of readers understood existence.
There is a lesson in that contrast that no amount of technological advancement can make obsolete.
We do not suffer from a shortage of things worth noticing.
We suffer from the increasingly cultivated inability to notice them.
And I suspect that long after today's loudest personalities have been forgotten, long after our manufactured controversies have dissolved into historical irrelevance, and long after the algorithms that dominate our attention have been replaced by newer methods of distraction, Annie Dillard's words will continue inviting people to look again.
Not because she possessed all the answers.
But because she understood the extraordinary dignity of taking the questions seriously.
So rest in peace, Annie Dillard.
You reminded us that the world was never ordinary.
Only our attention was.
And if that isn't one of the greatest gifts a writer can leave behind, I don't know what is.
Comments
Post a Comment