{"id":11718,"date":"2025-10-15T18:55:54","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T22:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/annie-dillard-on-how-to-live-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T18:55:54","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T22:55:54","slug":"annie-dillard-on-how-to-live-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/annie-dillard-on-how-to-live-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Annie Dillard on How to Live \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"What<\/a><\/p>\n

Suppose we answer the most important question of existence<\/a> in the affirmative. There is then only one question remaining: How shall we live this life?<\/a> <\/p>\n

Despite all the technologies of thought and feeling we have invented to divine an answer \u2014 philosophy and poetry, scripture and self-help \u2014 life stares mutely back at us, immense and indifferent, having abled us with opposable thumbs and handicapped us with a consciousness capable of self-reference that renders us dissatisfied with the banality of mere survival. Beneath the overstory of one hundred trillion synapses, the overthinking animal keeps losing its way in the wilderness of want. <\/p>\n

Not so the other animals. \u201cThey do not sweat and whine about their condition,\u201d Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass<\/em> (which is philosophy and poetry and scripture and self-help in one), \u201cthey do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.\u201d <\/p>\n

A century and a half after Whitman, Annie Dillard<\/a> looks to another animal for a model of how to live these human lives. Having let a muskrat be her teacher in unselfconsciousness<\/a>, she recounts her lens-clearing encounter with a weasel in an essay originally published in her 1982 packet of revelations Teaching a Stone to Talk<\/em>, later included in The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 one of my all-time favorite books.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Annie Dillard<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

She writes:<\/p>\n

\n

I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance.<\/p>\n

Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and across the highway, is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of shallowness, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk. Hollins Pond is also called Murray\u2019s Pond; it covers two acres of bottomland near Tinker Creek with six inches of water and six thousand lily pads. In winter, brown-and-white steers stand in the middle of it, merely dampening their hooves; from the distant shore they look like miracle itself, complete with miracle\u2019s nonchalance. Now, in summer, the steers are gone. The water lilies have blossomed and spread to a green horizontal plane that is terra firma to plodding blackbirds, and tremulous ceiling to black leeches, crayfish, and carp.<\/p>\n

This is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none is visible here. There\u2019s a 55-mph highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other. Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods, fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks \u2014 in whose bare clay wild turtles lay eggs.<\/p>\n

So, I had crossed the highway, stepped over two low barbed-wire fences, and traced the motorcycle path in all gratitude through the wild rose and poison ivy of the pond\u2019s shoreline up into high grassy fields. Then I cut down through the woods to the mossy fallen tree where I sit. This tree is excellent. It makes a dry, upholstered bench at the upper, marshy end of the pond, a plush jetty raised from the thorny shore between a shallow blue body of water and a deep blue body of sky.<\/p>\n

The sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, ensconced in the lap of lichen, watching the lily pads at my feet tremble and part dreamily over the thrusting path of a carp. A yellow bird appeared to my right and flew behind me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around \u2014 and the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.<\/p>\n

Weasel! I\u2019d never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard\u2019s; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin, maybe two brown hairs\u2019 worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn\u2019t see, any more than you see a window.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"
Weasel from from Natural History and Illustrations of Mammals<\/em> by Heinrich Rudolf Schinz, 1824.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Encounters are events, they touch things in us, change things in us, bend probability in the shape of the possible, tie time and chance into a knot of meaning between two creatures. Dillard recounts:<\/p>\n

\n

The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.<\/p>\n

Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don\u2019t. We keep our skulls. So.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Every meaningful encounter is a kind of enchantment \u2014 it comes unbidden and breaks without warning, leaving us transformed. As the weasel vanishes under the wild rose, Dillard finds herself wondering what life is like for a creature whose \u201cjournal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose leaf, and blown,\u201d and what clues that life might give her about how to live her own. Reflecting on the memory of the encounter, on the revelation of it, she writes:<\/p>\n

\n

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don\u2019t think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular \u2014 shall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands? \u2014 but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel\u2019s: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"
Art by Jackie Morris<\/a> from The Wild Cards<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Because we are creatures made of time, to change our way of being is to change our experience of time. She considers the chronometry of wildness:<\/p>\n

\n

Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested directly, like blood pulsed into my gut through a jugular vein.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is hard enough for a human being to attain such purity of being, harder still to share it with another. In a passage that to me is the purest, most exalted measure of love \u2014 love of another, love of life \u2014 she writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?<\/p>\n

We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience \u2014 even of silence \u2014 by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn\u2019t \u201cattack\u201d anything; a weasel lives as he\u2019s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.<\/p>\n

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you\u2019re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For more lessons on how to be human drawn from the lives of other animals, learn about time and tenderness from a donkey<\/a>, about love and loss from an orca<\/a>, and about living with a plasticity of being from a caracara<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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