The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New, Annie Dillard, 2016

This is a wonderful book.  How can it fail to be with an introduction from one of my favorite essayists, Geoff Dyer, and the best of another best, Dillard, with essays from seven of her books and one new one spanning the 42 years from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to the present.  As Dyer points out, “life is always and necessarily lived in detail.” and Dillard writes beautifully about those details in nature and in her life.  On topics as varied as the terror of watching a total eclipse of the sun from a hilltop in Washington to a comparison of polar exploration in the 19^th C to attending church, from detailed recollections of her feelings as a child to a long essay about Teilhard de Chardin, and on and on, Dillard writes so beautifully that I covered two sheets of paper with quotes, words to be looked up, and paragraphs to return to.   Here are some examples:  “Why are we reading if not in the hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened, and its deepest mystery probed…Why are we reading if not in the hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaning and will impress upon our minds the deepest mysteries so we may feel again this majesty and power.”   In writing about popular culture, she writes, “So the illusion (the world created by popular culture), like the visual field is complete.  It has no holes except books you read and soon forget.  And death takes us by storm. What was that life.”  Her writing about exploring her neighborhood (“explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.”  and “I walk out: I see something, an event I’d otherwise have utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.”) is perhaps the best description of my experience in Vermont just walking up the hill behind our home 366 different days of the calendar or simply sitting in a chair in the field looking at Ascutney—the skunk walking towards me down the path, the coyotes hunting the deer on the island in Anderson Pond, the pileated woodpecker flying low over my head in the pasture, and on and on.  Wonderful stuff and perhaps best summarized when she wrote about one of her nature walks, “There is no accounting for one second of it.” and  “Spend the afternoon.  You can’t take it with you.”