Her 1974 masterpiece Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ( public library) is one of those rare treasures best described as secular scripture, partway between Thoreau and Mary Oliver. In her 1984 novel The Lover, Marguerite Duras wrote that “the art of seeing has to be learned.” It is a sentiment at once poetic and practical - cognitive science now knows that our brains invest a great deal of resources in learning to unsee and tune out irrelevant stimuli, which is why “when you look closely at anything familiar, it transmogrifies into something unfamiliar.”Īnything that can be learned can be taught, and there is hardly a greater teacher in the art of seeing than Annie Dillard - an astute and lyrical observer of the world, both inner and outer, and a supreme enchantress of aliveness.
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