RJ 5: Dillard

For this year's Glen Workshop: Spiritual Writing, we've been asked to read Anne Lamott's Travelling Mercies and Annie Dillard's For The Time Being. I was rather excited about these choices as both writers are witty, thoughtful, and interesting. I first read Dillard when I used her The Writing Life as a textbook in Freshman Writing at Toccoa Falls College. Turns out that book isn't so much a book on HOW to write as it is WHY to write and how to go about LIVING a life that produces writing. Or at least that's what I thought of it then. Reading The Writing Life led to looking into Dillard's other work.

Reading Pilgrim At Tinker's Creek was like being doused with clear, cool water when you didn't know you were hot and dehydrated. Her willingness to find glory in both the ordinary wonders of nature and also it's hidden horrors was a revelation of observation. In it I saw the fruit of the values written about in The Writing Life. This was a writer who exemplified meditation and contemplation. For, the insights and observations of that book could only have been accomplished by a patient reconsideration of the same path through the woods day after day after day.

It is a patience I lack.

As I begin For The Time Being, I'm shocked to find myself a tad disappointed. While Tinker's Creek was certainly a book marked by a conglomeration of observations, this book seems downright fragmented, at least in the first chapter. I do see a conceit being set up that I hope turns out to be more than just a nifty organizational frame; Dillard has divided each chapter into titled sections: birth, sand, China, clouds, numbers, Israel, encounters, thinker, evil, now. It will be interesting to see how these groups develop. Will each chapter build on the section in the last? Will the ruminations on Teilhard de Chardin continue? What of the buried soldier statues in China? The sight she describes of these clay human figures slowly emerging from the ground is striking and could be fruitful.

From the section on evil, I was struck by this passage:

Rabbi Akiva taught a curious solution to the ever-galling problem that while many good people and their children suffer enormously, many louses and their children prosper and thrive in the pink of health. God punishes the good, he proposed, in this short life, for their few sins, and rewards them eternally in the world to come. Similarly, God rewards the evil-doers in this short life for their few good deeds, and punishes them eternally in the world to come. I do not know how that sat with people. It is, like every ingenious, God-fearing explanation of natural calamity, harsh all around.

Harsh all around, it is.