Dear Friends,
Two weeks ago I wrote about a quick succession of losses—Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, Wendell Berry, and Gloria Steinem—and how dispiriting it is to lose people of goodness and good humor. Then, this past week, one of my personal heroes and favorite writers, Annie Dillard, died. Annie Dillard is a fellow Pittsburgher, I know the streets she walked, where she went to high school—the fancy Ellis School—and to church, the also-fancy Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Introduced to Annie Dillard while still in high school, I’ve read nearly every word she wrote, from first book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize and earned Dillard comparisons to Thoreau, to her final book, The Maytrees, a slim novel about a generous, lifelong love among three people.
Dillard was a great observer of nature—its beauties and terrors—and peered into and behind it in search of God, in search of the Holy. It would not be hard to credit her for my sense of the Holy, pursuit of Awe, and belief in the power of reading to unlock the mysteries of the universe. My introduction to her came at a school assembly when a beloved teacher, now friend, quoted from Dillard. The passage read that day begins with Dillard writing about how as a child she delighted in hiding pennies along her neighborhood sidewalk, drawing huge chalk arrows labeled “surprise ahead,” and imagining how thrilled people would be with their found treasure.
Dillard ends the passage this way: “The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But — and this is the point — who gets excited by a mere penny?…It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple.”
Throughout her life Dillard wrote of the necessity of going through life, eyes wide open, and demanding answers of God and the universe. She stood amazed by nature, humans, mystics, the very stuff of life. She stopped writing 19 years ago so that she might devote her time to reading rather than writing. Many of us grieved that we would never get a new essay or book from her, but she left a legacy of amazement. And for that I give thanks.
See you in church!
Faithfully, Suzanne