THE ABUNDANCE:
Narrative Essays Old and New
By Annie Dillard
Ecco, 271 pp., $25.99
Is Annie Dillard relevant in the age of the New Noticing, when every egg sandwich, beach towel, and macaroon demands to be documented, shared? Dillard, who blasted onto the literary scene in 1974 as a 28-year-old with her Pulitzer Prize winning “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,’’ has, for the last four decades, been a sort of guiding voice, an essayist, poet, novelist, mystic, imploring us, again and again, to wake up, to pay attention, to look. And we do. But do we observe in the way Dillard describes and celebrates, sitting on a log by a creek, peering under stones, approaching the abyss, shaking a fist at the universe, asking the unanswerable questions, watching bewildered and dazzled as the stars swing across the sky? Does it matter?
“The Abundance,’’ her new collection, promises “Narrative Essays Old and New,’’ but readers may be dismayed to learn the newest are 14 years old. The assemblage displays Dillard’s specific energy and exuberance. It is both a joyful remembrance for fans and a delightul primer for the uninitiated. Hers is a voice that is vital, unrelentingly curious; she seems more alive than most and has made a career of locating the large in the small and the small in the large, as she does in her beautiful, beguiling work, “For the Time Being.’’ She writes of the matter that accumulates, the dirt that is all the time burying us, and the particles we breathe: “intimate fragments of run, dung, carcasses, leaves and leaf hairs, coral, coal, skin, sweat, soap, silt, pollen, algae, bacteria, spores, soot, ammonia, and spit.’’ All words we know, with her poet’s cadence and attention to sound, all basic parts of living, and yet how often do we consider these tiny unseeable bits? Her eye is trained on all that we miss in our dash and detachment, and we’re lucky that she’s been looking for us.
Dillard grounds us in the world, writes simply of waking up in the morning, of sunlight, weather, waterbirds. “It’s a good place to live,’’ she writes of her valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge, “there’s a lot to think about.’’ In other places, she spins our world upside down for us, and the language moves towards the galloping and incantatory: “Land is a poured thing and time a surface lapping and fringeing at fastness, at a hundred hollow and receding blues. Breathe fast: We’re backing off the rim.’’
She falters now and then, however, when the prose can sound, at its worst, like the pap on the tags of teabags (“Beauty is real.’’) or like rock lyrics (I hear the Allman Bros: “Nobody said things were going to be easy. A taste for the sublime is, after all, a greed like any other.’’). But all of it, each essay, fragment, moment, is marked by an urgency; Dillard tilts for the cliff, she “plays the edges,’’ as she urges writers to do in an excerpt from “The Writing Life.’’
The collection as a whole can almost be read as a metaphysical how-to. How to wake up, how to pay attention, how to look, how to be. “[Y]ou have to fling yourself at what you’re doing, you have to point yourself, forget yourself, aim, dive,’’ she writes.
Even when it’s not so directly prescriptive, the book reminds us of what’s there, and what’s not, of our own individual capacity for wonder, horror, astonishment. You don’t need to spend an entire afternoon in the grass contemplating a grasshopper. But I think she’d agree with a line from a Silver Jews’ song — “People gotta synchronize to animal time’’ — particularly when she writes of wanting to live as the weasel lives: “open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.’’
A consistency marks the collection; a heated blood pulse throbs through all of it. Dillard sings one note — and that’s fine. It’s an important note to be sung. It matters, and matters, and matters, particularly now, when we notice the light on our breakfasts but forget to take it further than that, out beyond the edges of what’s known. Dillard sings one note, but it’s two-toned: a clean and brassy trumpeting to get you out of bed and the deep gong of a bell, a cosmic vibration that ripples across the universe.
THE ABUNDANCE:
Narrative Essays Old and New
By Annie Dillard
Ecco, 271 pp., $25.99
Nina MacLaughlin is the author of “Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter’’ and can be reached at nmaclaughlin@gmail.com.
