With the death of Annie Dillard, another of America’s great writers has left the room this year. She made her first published appearance in 1974. Over the next several decades, she wrote more books, including Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a modern day Walden that’s become must reading for nature lovers and devotees of the meditated, simplified life. Then, with The Maytrees book in 2007, she chose not to write another: “I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.” In subsequent years, she focused on reading, painting, and walking.
In the rush of life, she gave me pause to weigh life’s essentials, to distill each day for what it is, to observe nature down to its minutiae with wonder and joy. I admired her passion for nature, her eloquence and candid confrontation with mortality and aging. Like the flowing waters of Tinker Creek, her legacy survives:
“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”
—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
RIP, dear Annie.
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Brimmings: up from the well 