In his foreword to this collection of essays,Geoff Dyer affectionately calls Dillard ‘scatty’, but it’s when she is at her most unconventional that this Pulitzer prize-winning writer shines most brightlyFor Annie Dillard theres no realm of knowledge without its accompanying gasp of wonder; she has a mystic’s appreciation of the glory and plurality of the world, and a gift for communicating astonishment. This collection of essays has tremendous range: amoebae to the Andromeda galaxy; specks of dust to planetary motion; redemption to the brute facts of suffering. Dillard is a Pulitzer prize-winner with a huge following in the US,but her work has been something of a well-kept secret in the UK. With the release of this new volume, that should change.
The anthology opens with “Total Eclipse” from her 1982 essay collection Teaching a Stone to Talk. Dillard describes driving five hours from her domestic on the Pacific coast to assemble with hundreds of others on a hillside to witness an eclipse, and but it’s doubtful any of those others were such acute observers,or so sensitive to the meanings that as human beings we cast into the world. She captures the shadow-cone of the moon speeding towards her: “It rolled at you across the land at 1800 miles an hour, hauling darkness behind it like plague … This was the universe approximately which we hold read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clock-work of loose spheres flung at stupefying, and unauthorized speeds.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com