Reading this book was like revisiting my old life as a college student, doing field work, collecting insects, identifying trees, and watching for wildlife. My interests in the Bible, theology, zoology, botany, and writing held a party in my mind as I read Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel. I loved this book.
A few quotes:
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
I cannot cause the light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
Fish gotta swim, and bird gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another.
The creation is not a study, a roughed-in sketch; it is supremely, meticulously created, created abundantly, extravagantly, and in fine.
I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.
I am buoyed by a calm and effortless longing, an angled pitch of the will, like the set of the wings of the monarch which climbed the hill by falling still.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek