{"id":2287,"date":"2023-05-01T06:31:23","date_gmt":"2023-05-01T10:31:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/annie-dillard-on-how-to-bear-your-mortality-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2023-05-01T06:31:23","modified_gmt":"2023-05-01T10:31:23","slug":"annie-dillard-on-how-to-bear-your-mortality-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/annie-dillard-on-how-to-bear-your-mortality-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Annie Dillard on How to Bear Your Mortality \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\n

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

\u201cTo die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,\u201d wrote Walt Whitman<\/a> a century and a half before Richard Dawkins considered the luckiness of death<\/a> as a radiant token of the improbable odds of having lived at all. Death \u2014 the harrowing fact of our mortality \u2014 is the central animating force of life, the one great terror for which we have devised the coping mechanisms of love and art. Everything we make, everything we do, is a bid for bearing our transience. And yet this is the native poetry of the cosmos \u2014 in a universe churned by entropy<\/a>, the very fact of our impermanence is life\u2019s most enduring source of meaning<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That is what the uncommonly poetic and penetrating Annie Dillard<\/a> explores throughout her book For the Time Being<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), published in the final year of the world\u2019s deadliest century.<\/p>\n

\"Total