There is a scene in David Remnick’s 2016 profile of Leonard Cohen for the New Yorker where the songwriter recounts an afternoon driving around Los Angeles with Bob Dylan. Dylan tells Cohen that another prominent songwriter had declared to him, “Bob, you’re Number 1, but I’m Number 2.” He clarifies this for Cohen: “As far as I’m concerned, Leonard, you’re Number 1. I’m Number Zero.”
“Meaning,” Cohen explains to Remnick, “that his work was beyond measure and my work was pretty good.”
For myself and many others, Annie Dillard—who passed into eternal life at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on September 15—was Writer Number Zero. Words like peerless and incomparable aren’t quite accurate: she had peers in Emerson and Thoreau, and her prose can reach Melvillian cadences in both incident and effect. Melville’s searching spirit, his seemingly fathomless hunger for that elusive mystery that lies at the center of things, is an apt touchstone: the words on Dillard’s page are like footprints of someone trying to find their soul in the universe left across a snowy field. To read her is to follow her in this venture, and soon you find your own attentiveness begins to sharpen, keening to her quest. It has to do with the way she uses language, which is not, in her hands, the language of discourse or exposition or critique—though it could be any or all of those things—but more like a physical implement that clears and canalizes new provinces of the mind.
“To the poet, phonetics and semantics are, with few exceptions, identical,” Joseph Brodsky wrote in his encomium for Marina Tsvetaeva. It’s an observation that could be applied to Dillard’s work, with its nimble musicality and the way perception is bound up in sound. She got her start at a poet and only later migrated to prose; she once spoke of poetry as an instrument and prose as an orchestra, so much wider did she consider its range of potential tones and effects. There’s some truth to this, given the formal properties of poetry as an art of distillation and prose as one of expansion, yet she was able to retain what Brodsky saw as poetry’s “lessons of laconism and harmony”: even in her more speculative passages, there is a trenchancy in her selection of detail so that the shimmering light of the sentences always catches on concrete particulars. We never take leave of the world in Dillard, but we pass through it, like a baptism, to arrive at some charged, and one might even say hallowed, understanding of our surroundings:
My brain is full of numbers; they swell and would split my skull like a shell. I examine the trapezoids of skin covering the back of my hands like blown dust motes moistened to clay. I have hatched, too, with millions of my kind, into a milky way that spreads from an unknown shore. (Chapter 10, “Fecundity”)
I stood under tulips and ashes, maples, sour wood, sassafras, locusts, catalpas, and oaks. I let my eyes spread and unfix, screening out all that was not vertical motion, and I saw only leaves in the air—or rather, since my mind was also unfixed, vertical trails of yellow color-patches falling from nowhere to nowhere. (Chapter 14, “Northing”)
Just a glimpse, Moses: a cliff in the rock here, a mountaintop there, and the rest is denial and longing. You have to stalk everything. Everything scatters and gathers, everything comes and goes like fish under a bridge. You have to stalk the spirit, too. You can wait forgetful anywhere, for anywhere is the way of his fleet passage, and hope to catch him by the tail and shout something in his ear before he wrests away. (Chapter 11, “Stalking”)
In studying these moments from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, one begins to understand the difference between lyric and rhetoric. Rhetoric may incorporate lyric, but no matter how soaring or the depth of the echo it might occasion in the hearer, there is always a subtle ulterior motive: it wants something from the hearer, whether it means winning him to some cause, however noble, or shoring up some uncertainty. Dillard’s sentences are squeezed dry of rhetoric, and what you are left with is a lyrical consciousness placed in perfect offering to the reader without demanding anything in return, not even an ideological assent. I’m not sure I even agree with her notion of “stalking” the spirit, beautiful though that it is—but the point is not that I’m convinced of its veracity as a principle so much as an element of her own experience. This is where her connection to Thoreau is at its strongest, that fidelity to the individual as his or her own best exegete of the text of the world.
Dillard converted to Catholicism in the late 1980s, a movement that makes sense given the incarnate spirituality and moral tenor of her work. Her books are studded with scriptural references, and she had the uncanny ability to conjure a sense of biblical time—the wan light of an old, quiet earth that has been waking up to itself anew each day, eon after eon. Though she ultimately left the church, maintaining a spiritual if not a sacramental bond, I am not sure that is the most fruitful line of inquiry in thinking about her project. Her work remains Catholic in the Greek sense of katholikos, “throughout the whole.” She expresses better than many within the church the reverence and wonder that should be central to our communion, and she does it through the hard, often lonely labor of trying to keep a patient heart attuned to the world’s gratuitous beauty—or its pitilessness or confusion, whatever the case may be—and transmuting it sentence by sentence. If we pass through the world in her writing, it is because she allowed it to pass through her first. ♦
Michael Centore is the editor of Tomorrow’s American Catholic.