I published this in an old blog I had, October 27, 2017. Since Annie Dillard passed away today, I thought I'd republish it. Kathy Shaidle, the Canadian poet and social commenter, sent me a nice note about it. She liked Dillard, too, I guess. And reading. Shaidle has since passed away. She was an interesting person. I learned a lot from her movie reviews, more than just about the movies. At one time she tried to be a "sex pot" but failed. She wrote about it. She did not know where her mother was buried and did not care.
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| N.C. Wyeth, cover illustration for the March, 1922, issue of The Ladies Home Journal. |
“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of my favorite things to do is read. It always has been, but I don't read now the way I read when I was younger. Then, reading was a special, private door into an unknown and fabulous world of elsewhere, othertime and otherness. Now I know they're just books.
“Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.”
“I read with pure, exhilarating greed.... Books swept me away, one after the other, this way and that; I made
endless vows according to their lights, for I believed them.”
"When you open a book,” the sentimental library posters said, “anything
can happen.” This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land
mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day.
Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been
rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked.
There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to
throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.”
“What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought
and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to
death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted
wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea
parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose
people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the
interior life. There you could live.”
“Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret
knowledge, a secret joy and a secret hope: There is a life worth living
where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for,
and circumstances where courage is still prized.”
~ Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
