Ridgeline — 234 — September 19, 2026

Walking with Annie

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I never met Annie Dillard (archive), and I don’t feel as if I know her. She seems unknowable. Part of her attraction: an improbable cipher looking at the world and delighting in minutiae. So, no, we never walked together (and now never will!), but I’ve walked 1000s of miles with her in mind.

On the Kii Peninsula, in Things Become Other Things (amzn | bkshp), I think of her whenever I see a particular boat:

… a boat that once pulled life from the water. I’ve watched it over time, passed it many times. Each time the ground rises a little more and the boat sinks in equal measure, and here it was today, once again.

Beyond suicides, it never fails to bring to mind dust around ankles, dust on the body (our old friend Bashō), volcanic-dusted food stalls in Pompeii. Annie Dillard wrote about dust, once, and I can’t help but think of her passage: “Earth sifts over things. If you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.”

If you want to learn to look more closely by observing someone doing so (“I watched at the window; I watched at the creek. A new wind lifted the hair on my arms.”), Annie’s ya gal. A famous passage of hers on a moth from Holy the Firm:

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax — a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle’s round pool.

The book of hers to read (if you read only one), though, still remains: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her late-20s burst of genius, which nothing else of hers ever quite hit the same resonant frequency.

I don’t remember when I first read Annie, but I feel like it was late. Late 20s at least, if not early 30s. This despite taking a few writing seminars and workshops at UPenn. I wish I had found her in my teens. Would she have made sense to my idiot teenage brain? I like to think she would have. Annie taught at a university down the road from my hometown. Had I read her back then, I might have sought her out. I likely would have driven to Wesleyan and hunted her down. Made camp on campus, asked around, begged to sit in on one of her classes. Most people don’t realize: these are things you can do. I did these sorts of precocious things constantly. I once drove to NYC to meet a reggae singer to ask for a connection to a studio to get a terrible CD mastered. It worked. (The mastering, not the CD.)

I’ve discussed Annie with many a friend. Writer Sam Anderson is a big fan. When Annie passed a few days ago, I was mid-walk in Norway with Kevin Kelly. He framed his attraction to her work succinctly: a scientific eye elevated to a spiritual plane. Or, how I think of her: someone who brought poetics to the scientific mind. She used precise words mixed with simple language swaddled in nature. And she didn’t even have a beard! Precise words in everyday vernacular, mixed with a poet’s eye for rhythm. This is what made her work feel so strange and new, and still feel so strange and new. There are no other writers who have done this as successfully as Annie, whose particular angle on literature and nature was sui generis.

She wrote about more than moths. On writing itself:

It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away. A painting covers its tracks. Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left. The latest version of a literary work begins somewhere in the work’s middle, and hardens toward the end.

And sentences:

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”

“Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know. . . . Do you like sentences?”

The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of the paint.”

Annie’s openings were always bold (though apparently the tomcat opening of Pilgrim was “borrowed”?!):

It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been like the death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread. It was like slipping into fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering. We had crossed the mountains that day, and now we were in a strange place — a hotel in central Washington, in a town near Yakima. The eclipse we had traveled here to see would occur early in the next morning.

… from probably her most famous piece of writing, the essay that folks keep returning to: Total Eclipse. My favorite part of that essay was her obsession with the clown painting, to which she dedicated many column inches:

I lay in bed. My husband, Gary, was reading beside me. I lay in bed and looked at the painting on the hotel-room wall. It was a print of a detailed and lifelike painting of a smiling clown’s head, made out of vegetables. It was a painting of the sort that you do not intend to look at, and that, alas, you never forget. Some tasteless fate presses it upon you; it becomes part of the complex interior junk you carry with you wherever you go. Two years have passed since the total eclipse of which I write. During those years I have forgotten, I assume, a great many things I wanted to remember — but I have not forgotten that clown painting or its lunatic setting in the old hotel. The clown was bald. Actually, he wore a clown’s tight rubber wig, painted white; this stretched over the top of his skull, which was a cabbage. His hair was bunches of baby carrots. Inset in his white clown makeup, and in his cabbage skull, were his small and laughing human eyes. The clown’s glance was like the glance of Rembrandt in some of the self-portraits: lively, knowing, deep, and loving. The crinkled shadows around his eyes were string beans. His eyebrows were parsley. Each of his ears was a broad bean. His thin, joyful lips were red chili peppers; between his lips were wet rows of human teeth and a suggestion of a real tongue. The clown print was framed in gilt and glassed.

“Lunatic setting” is a fabulous phrase. I’m glad a human discovered it.

She was always weird; in 1978, on socks: “Socks are corridors into other universes, where other laws obtain. Here the unimaginable terms of the Real intersect in time with the familiar objects of the quotidian — here, in socks in the wash.”

She was obsessed with solitude, even if much of hers was somewhat performative (alone, but not, though sometimes very). For Harper’s, she recommended the book Alone.

Alone, by Richard E. Byrd (Putnam’s, $6.50). Byrd set himself up in a shack on the South Pole, beyond all human aid in winter — and something went wrong. He was a gentleman, a hero, and he wrote well; I couldn’t catch my breath for a week.

Annie’s website is appealingly simple. And she was early. So whois tells me: Creation Date: 2002-03-26T19:05:51.00Z. Though it looks like someone else had it first, in 2001. Then it was turned briefly into an anti-abortion site. And then Annie bought it back, keeping it goofy, the text nearly unchanged for twenty-plus years.

Let me leave you with some of her most succinct advice, published in The New York Times in 1989:

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

In this age of algorithmic recommendations and smooth-brained AI speak, triviality is everywhere. We are awash in load-bearing triviality. Our bulwark against triviality is to applaud someone improbable. Annie was forever improbable. Her philosophies are more important than ever. Thanks for all the great sentences, and for so much to think about while out on the back roads.

More soon,
C