The Writing Life - Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard does not glamorise the writing life. She tells it as it is - mostly hard work, occasional high flying. Many of the metaphors and little stories she tells to describe the life of a writer are amusing, but hit hard at any romantic notions about writing. The cameo story she tells of an inchworm climbing one blade of grass after another, searching frantically for the next step at the top of each blade, resonated with me. Hammering together lines of words, probing ideas, keeping the whole thing together never gets easier. We just keep blindly on, climbing the blade, searching for the next, leaping into the void in faith.
So often we write into the dark. Even long-published, feted writers like Annie Dillard, fear that no one reads them, except maybe nerds, academics,  or other writers in the same field. Once, after publishing a long and complex essay partly concerning a moth and a candle, she thought that no one but an academic critic had understood it, or even read it. Some little boys came to the door as she was despairing about her wasted life. One of the children noticed a picture of a candle and asked if that was the one that the moth had flown into. Annie was bowled over. A child had heard the story and understood it well enough to tell it back. Such incidents lighten the solitude of writing and make the grind worthwhile.
I highly recommend this small book to any writer or aspiring writer. It is full of pearls of wisdom and Annie Dillard parables. It encourages even as it sweeps the rose-coloured glasses onto the floor.

More wisdom from Annie Dillard

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days."
Annie Dillard from The Writing Life

Beauty Itself

"What if the man could see Beauty Itself, pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine, ... the man becoming in that communion, the friend of God, himself immortal; ... would that be a life to disregard?"
Plato


Recognising beauty brings us close to God, close to that that is untainted by decay, and gives us a taste of immortality, of what is precious and eternal, of a life worth living.
As I copied out this quote that I discovered in Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, I uncovered words that I hadn't noticed on first reading. When people (not just men!) recognise beauty they come close to God (the perfect, the eternal) too. When writers see and share something beautiful or, amazingly, write something that takes a reader's breath away with its beauty, then their lives and works are surely worth respect, honour and attention.
So read to find that beauty; pay attention to the environment;  notice and perhaps communicate that rare thing or moment of beauty; come close to the eternal.