Some writers, once they enter your heart, never leave it.
They converse with your soul. They speak from a solid self.
Two long-time residents of my heart passed away within two weeks of each other not long ago: Wendell Berry on August 31 and Annie Dillard on September 15.
Many wonderful tributes have been offered for Berry, and rightly so: his iconic stance for the land, for local community, for love, and for life–especially in its most vulnerable stages–were well documented in a literary output produced over a lifetime of 92 years. His novels and short stories about the community “membership” in Port William, Kentucky. His essays that expose the inhumanities embedded in modern life. The clarion call in his poetry:
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
These lines are from the beloved “Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front” which speaks, from the year 1973, painfully and prophetically into our algorithmic times:
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
If you’ve never read Berry, my vote for a starting place would be for his unforgettable novel Jayber Crow (a book which has influenced a good many people to mourn the way we live these days, and more than a few–me included–to begin changing at least some of our ways). If you prefer nonfiction, you might try the essays in What Are People For? where he he makes his case more explicitly:
A good future is implicit in the forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid ‘futurology’ we have available to us is to take care of those things.
Or maybe turn to The Peace of Wild Things and find these lines, written during the Vietnam War:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds…
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
I will always be listening to and learning from this great man.
Dillard tributes are being offered as well, though less so. Her output doesn’t approach Berry’s weighty canon and her life, though public, wasn’t as vocal. But like Berry, Annie Dillard speaks with a voice wide awake to the mysteries of the natural world and the even deeper mysteries of the human heart.
She was frequently quoted in the decades after Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the Pulitzer Prize winning reflection that unfolds over the course of a year spent at Tinker Creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. “We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery,” she writes, before leading her readers so deeply into that mystery that we are struck silent, longing for one wordless syllable from the “still, small voice.” One spark of holy fire.
After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
Dillard pulls us, one exquisite sentence after another, to the place where the imminent and the transcendent is thin as a dragonfly’s wing.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek helps us take the idea of life as a pilgrimage with utmost seriousness and perhaps to travel for the rest of our lives with a field guide in one hand and a prayer book in the other. “I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs,” she declares, and spending time in her company, you find your eyes open just a little wider.
Like Thoreau’s Walden and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire–two books she had in mind as she wrote–Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a tribute to a piece of land well loved and well noticed. But it turns out that Dillard wasn’t living in a cabin as we might imagine while reading the book. She wrote it from the suburban home where she lived with her husband, close enough to the Roanoke Valley that she could spend the day there in the silent contemplation she so beautifully evokes for the rest of us.
That made me love her more, not less, when I learned it.
I was a young mother of two, working on a degree in English when I discovered Annie Dillard. The closest I could get to a silent retreat was precious time snatched when the boys were miraculously napping at the same time. But I still remember stepping outside the country house in the semi-desert Colorado valley where we lived while I was reading Dillard deeply. And I swear I saw the same tree with the lights that she spoke of. Of course it wasn’t. But I understood her meaning:
I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam….
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is an eye-opener to both the wonders and horrors of the natural world. Even more it is treatise against the complacency we so easily slip into. I find it difficult to sustain intensity as Dillard does in her writing, but when I need to be shaken out my slumber, she’s a good place to turn.
Holy the Firm and Teaching a Stone to Talk can do the trick as well.
My mother gave me my copy of Dillard’s An American Childhood, which remains one of my favorite memoirs.
One can easily imagine the future writer and naturalist as the intensely curious child she describes. Facing up to life’s early losses, she says:
As a life’s work, I would remember everything–everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net. I would trap and keep every teacher’s funny remark, every face on the street, every microscopic alga’s saw, every conversation, configuration of leaves, every dream, and every scrap of overhead cloud…Who would remember any of it, any of this our time, and the wind thrashing the buckeye limbs outside? Somebody had to do it, somebody had to hang on to the days with teeth and fists, or the whole show had been in vain.
There seems to me a strong connection between that passage and the work of Wendell Berry, the great rememberer. And it’s a fitting now that both these beloved souls have passed to what lies beyond to recall Berry’s simple, three-lined Sabbath Poem “1991, V”:
The seed is in the ground.
Now may we rest in hope
While darkness does its work.
Darkness will do its work in us, now that the seeds of these lives are fully planted. It’s up to us who remember similar and wholly other wonders to take up the task seriously. To stay awake. To listen. To remember.
And to practice resurrection.
Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard–Rest in peace.
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You might also enjoy Becoming Rememberers: How Wendell Berry Helps Us Grieve Our Time’s Tragic Tradeoffs and Small People and Places Shine in the Film Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry.
Reading right now: Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity with the Word on Fire Institute’s Book Club! Discussion threads begin next week, so if you’ve ever been interested in joining, this would be a great time. Not surprisingly, Kingsnorth was an avid follower of Wendell Berry’s work, and his tribute in First Things is a work of rich insight into the man and his legacy.
