Annie Dillard, Thoreau, and Mary Oliver

Annie Dillard died ten days ago, but I just found out about this the other day. I cried when I read that she had died. I cried yesterday morning driving back home after walking with Bird in a wild part of Sebastopol where the birds sing and feral cats dash in and out of the overgrowth.

I never met her, but I feel as if I’ve lost someone significant to me. Gloria Steinham’s death was a shock, but I didn’t cry. That was more of an Oh, no, she was supposed to live forever. Who are we without her? feeling. It was more related to the shocked numbness I’ve come to be so familiar with since Trump took office again. The loss of Gloria Steinham felt global while Annie Dillard, to me, feels personal.

Her essay, Living Like Weasels, is my North Star. Back when I lied a lot, I used to tell people I printed out this essay and ate it. What I was trying to say was that this piece of writing was part of my flesh and bones. What I was trying to say was that Annie Dillard may have written it, but also the essay was mine, was me.

A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks. He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bits his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the bast of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand as deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.

I often don’t notice for years or decades how writing that I love is connected to mother loss. What Annie Dillard says about the weasel teaches me what it looks to be yourself. It shows me that this wildness is natural and right. It shows me that it’s okay to stalk what you need, even more than you need, and it’s okay to hold onto what you want like a stubborn label. Motherloss, at least in my case, taught me to let go. It taught me how to live in a place of survival based on fear of extinction rather than from the wild place of surrender to need.

Annie Dillard wrote, I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn to leave as frankly, to forget about it. This is, I don’t think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular—shall I suck out warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands?—but I might learn something of mindfulness, something of the purity or living in the physical sense and the dignity of leaving without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way it like the weasel’s: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.  

In Walden, Thoreau wrote: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; not did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were subline, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Mary Oliver’s poem When Death Comes belongs here as well.  

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

I don’t need to say anything when these writers say what I carry in the core of who I am. Don’t you get it? Sometimes all we have to do is listen: everything we need has already been said, already been created. We get to see ourselves as others see themselves and the world; we get to see our deepest wishes; we get to live more fully because others lived before us.

Living Like Weasels ends in what feels to me like the most wonderful, universal call to live a wholehearted, embodied life:  

We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain and skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t “attack” anything; a weasel lives as if he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I think it would be well and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.

Thank you, Annie Dillard. Please give Mary and Henry David my best. May you soar.