Nehaveigur

I have known about Annie Dillard for some time but I have never before read anything she has written. In retrospect, that was a mistake. There is no better nature writing than Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Like Richard Dawkins or Carl Sagan, Dillard possesses an awe of nature that is heightened, rather than diminished, by science. Even more than others, she asks, so what? What does this mean, not just for science, but for what it means to be a human? Part of this is that she has a different vantage point. In her own words, “I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood.”

Here’s an example:

Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings in the skull. Unless all ages of races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grave wholly gratuitous.

And a bit later:

We’ve been on earth all these years and we still don’t know for certain why birds sing […] If the lyric is simply “mine mine mine,” then why the extravagance of the score?

I have not been able to find a single video of Dillard talking, but here she is being awarded the National Arts and Humanities Award in 2015.