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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/03\/06\/magazine\/annie-dillards-impossible-pages.html?emc=edit_nn_20260917&nl=the-morning&segment_id=226633",
    "parsed_content": "Annie DillardCredit...Raymond Meeks for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexSearch & Section NavigationSection NavigationAccountAccountGoHome U.S.SECTIONSU.S.PoliticsNew YorkCaliforniaEducationHealthObituariesScienceClimateWeatherSportsBusinessTechThe UpshotThe MagazineTOP STORIESDonald TrumpSupreme CourtCongressImmigrationAbortionLatest PollsNEWSLETTERSThe MorningMake sense of the day\u2019s news and ideas.The EveningCatch up on big news, and wind down to end your day.See all newslettersPODCASTSThe DailyThe biggest stories of our time, in 20 minutes a day.See all podcastsWorldSECTIONSWorldAfricaAmericasAsiaAustraliaCanadaEuropeMiddle EastScienceClimateWeatherHealthObituariesTOP STORIESMiddle East CrisisRussia-Ukraine WarChina International RelationsThe Global ProfileLeer en Espa\u00f1olNEWSLETTERSThe WorldA guide to understanding the news, made for readers around the globe.Your Places: Global UpdateThe latest news for any part of the world you select.Canada LetterBackstories and analysis from our Canadian correspondents.See all newslettersBusinessSECTIONSBusinessTechEconomyMediaFinance and MarketsDealBookPersonal TechEnergy TransitionYour MoneyTOP STORIESU.S. EconomyStock MarketArtificial IntelligenceNEWSLETTERSDealBookThe most crucial business and policy news you need to know.On TechOur best tech reporting from the week.See all newslettersPODCASTSHard ForkOur tech journalists help you make sense of the rapidly changing tech world.See all podcastsArtsSECTIONSToday's ArtsBook ReviewBest SellersDanceMoviesMusicTelevisionTheaterPop CultureT MagazineVisual ArtsRECOMMENDATIONS100 Best Movies of the 21st CenturyCritic\u2019s PicksWhat to ReadWhat to WatchWhat to Listen To5 Minutes to Make You Love MusicNEWSLETTERSBooksReviews, news and features to help you find your next read.WatchingStreaming TV and movie recommendations.See all newslettersPODCASTSBook ReviewThe podcast that takes you inside the literary world.PopcastPop music news, new songs and albums, and artists of note.See all podcastsLifestyleSECTIONSAll LifestyleWellTravelStyleReal EstateFoodLoveYour MoneyPersonal TechT MagazineCOLUMNS36 HoursAsk WellThe HuntModern LoveWhere to EatVowsSocial Q\u2019sThe EthicistAsk the TherapistNEWSLETTERSThe WeekenderUnwind with stories about culture and the way we live.WellEssential news and guidance to live your healthiest life.See all newslettersPODCASTSModern LoveThe complicated love lives of real people.See all podcastsOpinionSECTIONSOpinionGuest EssaysEditorialsOp-DocsVideosLettersTOPICSPoliticsWorldBusinessTechClimateHealthCultureCOLUMNISTSJamelle BouieMaureen DowdDavid FrenchThomas L. 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Win ProjectionsNEWSLETTERSThe PulseDelivering the top stories in sports, Sunday to Friday.See all newslettersPLAYConnections: Sports Edition Connections: Soccer Edition Connections Coach U.S.InternationalCanadaEspa\u00f1ol\u4e2d\u6587FeatureAnnie Dillard\u2019s Impossible PagesThree early and unpublished works by the author of \u201cPilgrim at Tinker Creek.\u201dAnnie DillardCredit...Raymond Meeks for The New York TimesSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTShare full articleIntroduction by Sam AndersonMarch 2, 2016It\u2019s unclear what to call Annie Dillard, where to shelve her. Over more than 40 years, she has been, sometimes all at once, a poet, essayist, novelist, humorist, naturalist, critic, theologian, collagist and full-throated singer of mystic incantations. Instead of being any particular kind of writer, she is, flagrantly, a consciousness \u2014 an abstract, all-encompassing energy field that inhabits a given piece of writing the way sunlight clings to a rock: delicately but with absolute force, always leaving a shadow behind. This is an essential part of what it means to be human, this shifting between the transcendent self and the contingent world, the ecstasy and the dental bill. We all do some version of it, all the time. But Dillard does it more insistently. This month, she publishes \u2018\u2018The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New,\u2019\u2019 a collection of pieces that spans her entire variegated career.Dillard began publishing books in 1974. \u2018\u2018Tickets for a Prayer Wheel,\u2019\u2019 a small collection of poems, was followed immediately by \u2018\u2018Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,\u2019\u2019 a long nonfictional account of her experience embedding, Thoreau-style, for a year of close observation of the titular waterway in Virginia. \u2018\u2018Pilgrim\u2019\u2019 won the Pulitzer Prize and unleashed upon the world Dillard\u2019s radical style: prose right on the border of poetry, dense with dazzling effects \u2014 strong metaphors, heavy rhythms, bold verbs, sudden parables, outlandish facts harvested from the darkest corners of the library. From the start, this has been Dillard\u2019s mission: to crowbar surprise, sentence by sentence, into all the tiny gaps of our ordinary experience. \u2018\u2018Water turtles smooth as beans were gliding down the current in a series of easy, weightless push-offs as men bound on the moon,\u2019\u2019 she writes in \u2018\u2018Pilgrim.\u2019\u2019 A pile of burned books \u2018\u2018flaked in my hand like pieces of pie.\u2019\u2019 In Dillard\u2019s writing, strange things are constantly becoming familiar, and vice versa. (\u2018\u2018Like mushrooms and engines, they didn\u2019t have hands,\u2019\u2019 she writes of nuns.) Above all, Dillard refuses to fall into traditional expository rhythms, to calm down, to be normal, to proceed with caution. She feels driven, always, to summon revelations out of nothing \u2014 to \u2018\u2018call for fireworks, with only a ballpoint pen.\u2019\u2019You will find, in the following pages, a small but rare bloom of Annie Dillard\u2019s fireworks: three early essays, all short and characteristically strange, all appearing for the first time in this form. They have been revised multiple times over multiple decades, because Dillard is always revising, and then re-revising. When your project is to articulate all the intricately nested subtleties of a human mind in contact with the ever-changing world, your work, by definition, will never stop.Two of these essays (\u2018\u2018Recalling Niels Bohr\u2019\u2019 and \u2018\u2018Lonesome, With Snails\u2019\u2019) revolve around jokes \u2014 a favorite subject of Dillard\u2019s. In one, the joke is that a fireplace, paradoxically, cools a room. In the other, a snail is described, absurdly, as \u2018\u2018short.\u2019\u2019 That\u2019s it. Those are the jokes. They are not, by normal joke-telling standards, particularly good; they are run-of-the-mill, everyday, lukewarm witticisms. But such everydayness serves Dillard\u2019s purposes exactly. We don\u2019t need great writing to tell us that obviously amazing things are amazing, just as we don\u2019t need high-powered telescopes to tell us that the sun is warm. What we need from great writing, most urgently, is an understanding that the mundane itself \u2014 snails, fireplaces, shrubs, pebbles, socks, minor witticisms \u2014 is secretly amazing.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTPoetry and jokes are each, as William Carlos Williams said of the former, machines made out of words, and Dillard is a highly trained mechanic. In \u2018\u2018An American Childhood,\u2019\u2019 her classic memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh, Dillard describes life with her parents as a long and rigorous apprenticeship of wisecracking. Her description of the compressed power of a joke (\u2018\u2018A few words suggested a complete story and a wealth of feelings\u2019\u2019) applies equally well to the compressed power of poetry. Each form emphasizes the sudden turn, the improbable connection. Dillard\u2019s brand of neo-Transcendentalist prose-poetry is, in this light, a distant cousin of stand-up comedy: a risky solo performance that depends, to a large extent, on the unusual motions of a mind, as rendered in a deliberately heightened style, with the goal of ecstatic density.And so, in Dillard\u2019s joke essays, Thoreau and Colette and Heisenberg and Niels Bohr commingle with an unnamed Tennessee mountain hermit who has invented the typewriter 50 years too late; snail\u2019s feet, upon being touched, \u2018\u2018recoil, curling, like tickled lips.\u2019\u2019 This is sit-down stand-up, to be consumed by a silent audience of one.The second essay here, \u2018\u2018Utah,\u2019\u2019 is less like a joke than a dream: a surreal flight of free-associative fancy. Dillard sees (or does not see) windshield wipers in the desert, \u2018\u2018clacking dry as hoofbeats over the glass\u2019\u2019 and \u2018\u2018hurling themselves from side to side like dancers.\u2019\u2019 She sees (or does not see) Native Americans the size of ants. But then, as she says near the end of the essay: \u2018\u2018Truth interests me less than contact.\u2019\u2019One of these essays ends, out of nowhere, with a brief but bold artistic manifesto. \u2018\u2018Possible books abound; I\u2019d rather write an impossible page.\u2019\u2019 This might help to explain why Dillard has written less and less over the years. There will always be the lure of the merely possible, and very few writers have the discipline to stay away. Dillard, for good and for ill, is one of them. We have, here, a few more of her impossible pages.One. | Recalling Niels BohrI am beginning to bore myself with the following joke about the fireplace. Since it doesn\u2019t draw well, I open the door a crack, which circulates air through the room and up the chimney. This cools the room. I say I\u2019m going to get another couple cords of wood this summer for air-conditioning. I have not noticed that the innocent islanders in the captive audience on the receiving end of this little pleasantry are rushing it into print, but I have just found it in Werner of-all-people Heisenberg, in \u2018\u2018Physics and Beyond.\u2019\u2019 One cannot be too careful of one\u2019s reading.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTHeisenberg attributes the first remarking of this remark, quite correctly, to Niels Bohr (\u2018\u2018who loved paradoxical formulations\u2019\u2019) \u2014 for, although this might have been another of those many instances of simultaneous discovery by independent researchers which confound lay thinkers, but at which casehardened science historians merely shrug, it is, alas, not. The intervening decades are too embarrassingly long.My belated discovery that fire cools is like the famous case of the Tennessee mountain hermit who called a newspaper reporter to his shack because he had, in the 1930s, invented the type\u00adwriter. (The typewriter had been invented in ever-improved forms since 1867 and was in common use by 1900.) This man\u2019s was an enormous, loom-size construction with a keyboard like a piano\u2019s, whose keys one depressed either by two slammed fists or by a wood-splitter\u2019s maul. But that is another tale. Niels Bohr, according to Heisenberg, \u2018\u2018claimed that the fireplace had been especially put in as a cooling device.\u2019\u2019 Surely now this joke is well wrung.Werner Heisenberg\u2019s \u2018\u2018Physics and Beyond\u2019\u2019 disappoints me. He is merely filling in the inches. He knows the material in this book cold \u2014 too cold. It is far behind him, not only in years, but in his thinking and, one hopes, in his sense of what writing is. But it is a book. People read books. If you have something to say, write a book. Thoreau\u2019s Kathmandu principle, the Colette principle (\u2018\u2018Break of Day\u2019\u2019 as diary), still holds: You can write anything, anything at all, if you\u2019re honest, because we are each as bizarre and foreign to one another as the news from Kathmandu (as Colette\u2019s life was to me).On the other hand. Writing is too hard to waste on the weirdness of your daily life, or at least on mine. I love to sock the reader into some odd time and place and let him breathe there and love it, and love the world for having such a place \u2014 and then to call for fireworks there with only a ballpoint pen. Possible books abound; I\u2019d rather write an impossible page.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTArgument is penny-ante play, or talk with tea. It is the literary, pace Julia A. Moore (\u2018\u2018the sweet singer of Michigan\u2019\u2019), that is \u2018\u2018a work very difficult to do.\u2019\u2019 Arguing draws a line linking corridors through chaos with reason. Art, by contrast, is the whole ball of wax \u2014 a system, coherent, chopped out from chaos and held.Two. | UtahAugust: I\u2019m trying to float this Plymouth over State Route 740. There has been nine years\u2019 drought in this spot, and the canyons are cracking like pods. The heat heaves from the asphalt: No wonder the roadrunner runs. Show that bird cool grass and he\u2019ll loll till kingdom come.A truck comes along trailing a travois of dust, a Ford pickup, and the fellow\u2019s got his windshield wipers on. Some drunk, I think; there\u2019s not a cloud. Next thing, an old Mustang rounds the bend, robed in dirt, full of dogs, and the wipers are on, the wipers are on, clacking dry as hoofbeats over the glass. The sun\u2019s burned my eyes, I think; it\u2019s a whiteout, heat exhaustion, delirium. I pass a Chevy pickup, meet a \u201958 Olds, and everything\u2019s normal; then here comes some young guy with a Pinto, and the wipers are on, hurling themselves from side to side like dancers.That night in a motel in Moab I heard the story. It\u2019s a fad now, the last few years, with the local Native Americans. They flick on the windshield wipers when the land needs rain. Like a prayer wheel! I was amazed! You should have told me.Actually, I was in line at the light on Peters Creek Road, coming back from the liquor store, clear day, and the lady in front of me had her wipers on. Just cleaning her windshield with water shot up from her car. That\u2019s all. Believe what you will; take what you want.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThere\u2019s a May drought on. All day yesterday I followed Tinker Creek to its source. I drove north to the first place the creek cuts under a road, parked by a cedar and headed upstream, up the mountain, up under the flowering dogwood and into the laurel and pines. Early in the afternoon, I ate lunch. The creek bed narrowed, blackened and emptied. I climbed on stones. Soon I straddled the creek, and then it died, or was born, at a patch of sourgrass in a strip of sunlight torn by a windthrown oak. A rock marked the source, a chip of granite shoulder; I threw it aside and crouched.There, under the granite, was a tiny traveling tribe of Native Americans, perfectly formed. They emerged, stuck with clumps of clay, from the right side of the red hole, brushed themselves off and filed to the left side, where they pried the earth apart and scrambled in. Their dogs ran alongside, barking minutely; their travois poles, slung from ponies, etched faint parallels in the ground. The adults kept catching their hair in grass roots coming and going. Streamers hung from their armbands, lodge poles and parfleche bags. Several women wore dresses that rattled from deer hooves sewn in pairs to hems. One woman \u2014 in this heat! \u2014 had wound fringed doeskin leggings over her calves. Over her back fell a sunbleached, hairless, elkskin robe.I pressed my ear hard to the ground to catch their words. \u2018\u2018Wrakan,\u2019\u2019 I heard in one song, repeated in a whining chorus \u2014 a word which I believe is Crow for \u2018\u2018water,\u2019\u2019 but which in modern usage can also mean \u2018\u2018eel.\u2019\u2019What I want, what any of us wants, doesn\u2019t, apparently, matter. Our daily rain-bread, our nightly salt-rising. I stuck a cedar bough under your windshield wiper upright, like a feather in a headband, in a hatband, like a feather in a mirror frame, flame. I have barely spit to lick a finger, barely a finger to stick upright for wind. Truth interests me less than contact.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTMy eyes need wiping; I\u2019ll wash the windows with whisky. I\u2019ll seed the clouds. I run roads, seeking sweetgrass or sour. I take off shoes; I run roads, clattering on split hooves. I bed down in laurel, leaving the faintest of tracks, till kingdom come.Three. | Lonesome, With SnailsMy best friends are two land snails. I feel very close to them sometimes; we each share all that we have, all that we know and are. They slide around slowly, up the mantelpiece and down. I sit or pace in my rooms, agitated, picking up and putting down a saxophone, changing my shirt, hefting by turns a china lamp, a leather pouch, trying to joke with the snails. One is tannish; one is yellowish.They differ \u2014 the yellowish one is more. .\u2009.\u2009. Oh, if they were very different, if one were, say, a musician, wry, and one a muscular philosopher, say, what society I would enjoy! For the plain fact is, if you insist upon it, that they are much alike. So much alike that for most purposes, an outside observer, and even, to be perfectly frank, myself, would have to call them identical, more or less. Quiet.After I have spent some long time absorbed with the snails and their ways, occasionally, or, in fact, almost always, I am struck by the incongruity of the picture we present. I am, after all, a human being, and, as such, almost six feet tall, give or take a few inches. I line up the snails on my palm and inspect their ranks. I carry them to my eye, while one snail or the other retracts and protrudes first one feeler, then another. I wait until all four of the knobby bulbs on their feeler tips are fully extruded and plump, until they are well forward, supplied with a dark drop of blood, and calm .\u2009.\u2009. and then I see myself suddenly and think, I treat my friends too curiously, too curiously for words! I put the snails under the philodendron, disgusted, and leave, walk to the newsstand, hail and greet the newsstand owner behind the counter with his wondering, joyous expression; and buy the foulest cigars at any price and carry a dozen to my rooms, triumphant.Or I say to the snails, \u2018\u2018Friends, children, illiterates, you imbecilic nubs\u2019\u2019 (and I stroke or pinch the furls of their feet, which recoil, curling, like tickled lips), \u2018\u2018The trouble with you, the ridiculous, ludicrous thing about both of you, is: You are too short.\u2019\u2019AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTShort! Look at them! It is unheard-of to be so short! Friends are friends, and I love these two on their merits and idiosyncrasies quite apart from their positions as my sole and best friends, and quite apart from the figures they cut \u2014 just as you love your friends, I am sure. But their size, once I notice it, strains my credulity.Once this notion takes possession of me, as it has, I confess, now, the inappropriateness of the snails\u2019 height, which at first seems so marvelously comical, takes on a lunatic air, the smack of a cosmic incongruity. It is an anomaly so endlessly comical that the very length of its humor pierces the bounds of the mind and touches the rim of mystery itself. It is too much to think about, and far too much to explain, that these snails are so impossibly short.Sometimes in consequence I have taken a kettle from the fire and thrown it through a window. Sometimes, I jump on my own foot, I bite my finger, I run out and break a framed painting over the skull of a pedestrian (once); I throw things; I do, actually, love to throw many things. There is much I love. Because the world is so astonishing, the snails \u2014 to take just one of the many possible examples \u2014 are so short, and it is all too great for me to think about alone. Or at all.On many fine mornings I do not concern myself overmuch with the mystery. And by controlling the depth of my thinking carefully, I permit myself a little joke.\u2018\u2018Good morning,\u2019\u2019 I say to each snail in turn: to the tannish one looking dead on the hearth, slowly turning her gelatinous head; to the half-dead yellowish one who rides a trail of slime up a window like Botticelli\u2019s Venus afloat on a frilly foot \u2014 \u2018\u2018Good morning .\u2009.\u2009. \u2019\u2019 I say, narrowing my eyes, \u2018\u2018Shortie.\u2019\u2019And a good morning it may be. Many are.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
    "published_at": "2016-03-02T12:00:06+00:00",
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    "ai_headline": "Annie Dillard\u2019s Impossible Pages",
    "ai_simplified_title": "Annie Dillard's Early Unpublished Works Explored",
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