Annie Dillard and the Limits of Discursive Thought

For the Time Being by Annie Dillard.  Vintage Books.  160 pp. *****

Annie Dillard was a prodigy of reading, and of learning.  The one time we spoke on the phone, she told me she was one of the judges for the upcoming Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction.  She mentioned how many volumes she was reading, and I don’t remember the number, but the very thought was staggering to me (to say nothing of judging for the Pulitzer).  She seemed entirely non-plussed.  In his excellent piece in the New Yorker, Robert Baird spoke of both Annie and her husband spending 12 or 14 hours a day reading.  I love to read, it’s one of my favorite things to do, but the thought of such a day makes my eyeballs ache.  But the woman was learned.  She wasn’t a scholar and didn’t have degrees, but she could put her general knowledge beside anyone’s.

That learning is in full display in For the Time Being.  Each of the ten chapters contains sections; the first chapter is representative: Birth, Sand, China, Clouds, Numbers, Israel, Encounters, Thinker, Evil, Now.  Some of these topics are religious, some scientific, some mix the two.  She is trying, basically, to make some sense of the world and express her awe at it, to understand why God (whose very existence is up for grabs) does some of the things he does.  Birth defects, for instance (she finds some doozies).  Scientific facts about sand and dust.  The number of people who are alive now, the number of people who have ever been alive, how long human beings have been alive.  The number of people wiped out by a single tsunami, or a plague.  These numbers are staggering.  She’s great at hunting them up.

Her spiritual heroes are various Hasidic Jews (who were very much people of the book, like her) and Teilhard de Chardin, who combined scientific learning with a deep faith in Catholicism, to which Dillard converted in 1988, then later renounced her conversion.  She says in a note on her website that, although she renounced formal religion, she remains close to Catholicism and Hasidism.

Several years ago, I was a guest lecturer at a course called The Good Life at Duke University.  It asked speakers of various religious persuasions (including a stoic and an atheist) to come in and explain the religion they practiced, and to address various larger questions.  The class itself was large (over a hundred people) and didn’t seem particularly religious.  The course was obviously easy (aren’t they all these days?  The amount of reading we could assign was pathetic).  People seemed to be taking it out of a general interest and for the credit.

I was astounded one day when the head professor asked students if they thought God had a plan for the universe (maybe he said just the world) and a plan for individual people’s lives, and something like 80% of these seemingly intelligent students said they did.  He then said to me, “David, I assume you don’t agree with that”—I was the representative Buddhist—and I think you would say I sputtered my response, I was so astounded.  “Of course not,” I said.  “Life just unfolds.”

I wish Annie Dillard had been with me that day.  In passage after passage in this book, she points out the problems with such thinking.  She speaks of the earth as “the black mute stone that requires men to ask, Why is there something here, instead of nothing?”  She goes on.  “And why are we aware of this question—we people, particles going around and around this black “stone?  Why are we aware of it?”  “What use is material science as a philosophy or world view if it cannot explain our intelligence and our consciousness?”  “

She moves on to various stunning facts.  “Every year, sixty million people die; of these, half are children under five.”  “On April 30, 1991—on that one day—138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh.”  Not all the catastrophes are vast.  “Why did God let the Romans flay an eighty-five-year-old Torah scholar?”

In her sections on birth defects, she shadows a nurse who washes newly born children, she mentions one child that with born with gills like a shark’s and a long tail.  When the baby came out of the womb, the tail came up between its legs so that, for a moment, the baby’s gender was obscured.

How do you explain that birth to the parents?

She doesn’t exactly mock conventional religious views, but she has some deadpan moments.

“Guy Simon was a Presbyterian minister in Michigan.  He sailed some friends out on Lake Charlevoix; the boat capsized, and a child and a man drowned.  After he got ashore, he walked up and down the beach hitting his hands together and saying, “Oh, pshaw!  Oh, pshaw!”

It is as if Annie was one of the students in The Good Life, facing that question, and she decided to scour the literature of the world searching for an answer to it.  She spent years doing it.  She read scientists, historians, spiritual teachers, all kinds of people.  For instance, “There is, or was, a contemporary religious crank named Joel Goldsmith, for whose illogical, obscurely published books I confess a fond and enduring weakness.”  (I haven’t read his books, but I will admit to stumbling across his website.  As goofy and unconventional as much of it was, I thought he was on to something.)   And at the end of this slender book, having condensed all that she found into its very gist, in sentences that are both entertaining and mind boggling, she more or less, What the hell.  Who knows?

People have speculated about the long silence at the end of Annie’s life.  In a brilliant article in the Atlantic, William Deresiewicz suggests that she had begun to repeat herself, was not writing as effectively, and had decided to go silent.  If that’s true, it is a miracle from God, because most writers (Jim Harrison, one of my favorites, is a great example) just go on and on publishing everything they do, while the quality goes downhill.

Elsewhere, in interviews, Annie gave what seems to me a more honest answer.  She said she’d been working hard for many years.  Indeed she had; if you look at the list of her published work, it’s mighty impressive.  And she was tired.  She just wanted to read, and take walks, and paint.  She wanted to take a rest.  She wanted to close with silence.

I think that was a good idea.  And honestly, if she had only written this book, I would understand.  The work that went into this volume is mammoth, and I have tremendous admiration for it.  It is as honest an attempt to understand the way of things as I know.  If she wasn’t finally able to do that, nobody else has either.  At least she was willing to admit it.