She called herself a “gregarious recluse,” but there was in her single-mindedness no retreat from the world. She had simply found her place in it, and through luck and privilege (which is also, finally, at the individual level, just luck), been allowed to stay there. How few people get that opportunity! The Annie Dillard who celebrated her mother, in An American Childhood, for teaching her daughters to hate bullies and withstand oppressors, the Annie Dillard who mourned and memorialized anti-Chinese violence in The Living (1992) and who asked, in her great essay on the Book of Luke, why Christian churchgoers have so much money, would not want us to forget that everybody deserved the opportunities she got. But also: nobody else would have made of them what Annie Dillard did. Whether you looked at the hand, or at the things it pointed to, she shone.
A beautiful tribute by Phil. I was still reckoning with the loss of John Crowley when Wendell Berry died, and now Dillard! It’s going to take me months to sort out my thoughts and feelings about these writers, all of whom have meant a great deal to me.