Annie Dillard
b. 1945
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
The Argument
Annie Dillard is the writer who looks at the natural world with the intensity of a mystic and the precision of a scientist and reports back that reality is stranger and more violent and more beautiful than either framework alone can contain. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and established her as the heir to Thoreau, but her theological seriousness goes deeper than Thoreau's — she has read the mystics, she has wrestled with the problem of evil in nature, and she has not resolved it into optimism.
Her chapter on the fecundity of nature — the sheer excess of biological production, the billions of things born to die — is one of the most honest confrontations with the problem of theodicy in modern American literature. She does not explain it. She sits with it. And sitting with it, she arrives at something that is not comfort but is not despair either — a kind of awe before a reality that exceeds her comprehension but does not, she concludes, exceed the capacity for meaning.
For literary apologetics, Dillard is the writer who demonstrates that sustained attention to the natural world, pursued with sufficient rigor and honesty, arrives at theological questions that natural observation alone cannot answer. She has looked at creation as hard as anyone in her generation and found it pointing beyond itself. The question it points toward is the question this site exists to read for.
The Literary Apologetic
New essays from the long tradition. No noise. Just letters worth reading.