Muskrats in their dens “strew the floor with plant husks and seeds, rut in repeated bursts, and sleep humped and soaking, huddled in balls.” The language makes of brute factuality a verbal music. “Any object at a distance-like the dead, ivy-covered walnut I see from the bay window-looked like a black-and-white frontispiece seen through the sheet of white tissue.” But she doesn’t need a simile to send a sense aloft. A creek bank is a “twiggy haze.” A gibbous moon is “softly frayed, like the heel of a sock.” “It snowed all yesterday and never emptied the sky,” Dillard tells us. The text itself is thickly planted with marvels to watch for, its vision fresh as Adam’s on the first day. With flourishes of brass, she proclaims a new dawn. She summons us to wake from dull routine.
She delivers doctrine with the certainty of revelation and the arrogance (and agedness) of youth. “I propose to keep here,” she announces at the start of her account, “what Thoreau called ‘a meteorological journal of the mind.’ ” She scrutinizes nature with monastic patience and a microscopic eye. Sojourning for many a season, she distills her experience down to a symbolic single year. An ardent young American takes to the woods, anchoring herself beside a water. The book was unabashed about its lineage.
But Dillard’s turn to silence, if that is what it is, could in retrospect be seen as having been inevitable all along-given her choice of materials, her idiosyncratic sensibility, the very nature of her project.ĭillard declared her arrival, at the age of 28-brash and bold and talented beyond belief-with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). There are many reasons a writer might slow down or even stop, most of them mysterious to strangers. The most recent essay in the book, which is also the only one not included in a previous volume, is 11 years old. The subtitle, Narrative Essays Old and New, is false advertising there are no new pieces here. The Abundance only serves to underscore the dearth. (Some might add An American Childhood, her celebrated memoir.) In the 17 years since, she’s published one, and none since 2007. Over the following 25 years, she published 10 more original volumes, including two that have achieved the status of modern classics, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a latter-day Walden, and The Writing Life, a “spiritual Strunk & White” (as one reviewer put it), and two more that deserve to, Holy the Firm, which might have been written in letters of flame, and Teaching a Stone to Talk, a jewel box of narrative meditations. It speaks of absence-for nature’s profusion, in Annie Dillard, is everywhere the signage of the hidden god she seeks-and it also marks an absence: hers. T he abundance, a selection from the work of one of the great, original voices in recent American letters, might just as easily be called The Absence.
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