The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

They will question thee concerning what they should expend.
Say: The Abundance.

~The Qur'an, Sura of The Cow

The Abundance is subtitled “Narrative Essays Old and New”, and for the most part, these “essays” are excerpts from the books of Annie Dillard that I have read before. Repeatedly, I was delighted to rediscover those passages that I had loved upon first reading (passages that I quoted from copiously the first time around), and as a collection, I think this is a really fine book: anyone not already familiar with Dillard would get a fascinating sampling, and we who are longtime fans are reminded of the best bits. Because I have already reviewed many of the books excerpted here, I'm just going to pull some new quotes that I enjoyed this time around. 

The Foreword is written by Geoff Dyer, and in it, he attempts to explain what is unique about Dillard's writing:

On the humor front it helps, also, that Dillard's pretty much a fruitcake. In an insightful review of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Eudora Welty confessed that at certain points “I honestly do not know what she is talking about”. And Pilgrim is far from being Dillard's most difficult or nuttiest offering; that honor would have to go to Holy the Firm (really bonkers and all the more enjoyable for it). Incomprehension is usually the result of obfuscation, the words refusing to slip into focus; Dillard, however, remains a writer of exceptional clarity, even when we are struggling to grasp the meaning of what is being said so clearly, so brightly.

And that's the thing: as much as I have been moved by Dillard's writing, it's impossible not to recognise that she's a “fruitcake”, “nutty”, and “bonkers”; but she's merely putting into words the ways in which we're all not quite aligned with whatever it is that “reality” is supposed to be. Here she is writing about what it is to be an adolescent, and for whatever reason, this bit made me catch my breath this time around:

I envied people in books who swooned. For two years I felt myself continuously swooning and continuously unable to swoon. The blood drained from my face and eyes and flooded my heart; my hands emptied, my knees unstrung, I bit at the air for something worth breathing – but I failed to fall, and I couldn't find the way to black out. I had to live on the lip of a waterfall, exhausted.

Repeatedly, Dillard shares the scientific consensus on some aspect of nature (while always keeping the science human by including biographical details about the scientists themselves), and then in a reversal, she uses poetic devices in her prose to reconfigure the actual as metaphor. In one essay, Dillard tells the story of a farmer who shot an eagle out of the sky (and despite being someone who is drawn to and spends much time in raw nature, Dillard is always sanguine in the face of animal death and suffering), and when the bird was recovered, it was found with the jaws of a weasel clamped around its throat; the rodent's body having been, apparently, eaten away alive by the stricken bird; those relentless jaws never unclamping even unto death. At the end of this essay, Dillard concludes:

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're going to no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you aloft even, till your eyes burn out and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from high as eagles.

In the final essay, Dillard goes back and forth between her experience at a Catholic folk mass that is followed by a Baptism, and tales from last century's polar expeditions. These two seemingly unrelated narratives seesaw back and forth until Dillard conflates the two, imagining that the church's floor is covered in ice; that she is drifting on an ice floe, surrounded by the other parishioners and the resurrected bodies of lost explorers, and by the time it's done, the whole thing makes perfect existential sense.

My name is Silence. Silence is my bivouac, and my supper sipped from bowls. I robe myself each morning in loose strings of stones. My eyes are stones; a chip from the pack ice fills my mouth. My skull is a polar basin; my brain pan grows glaciers, and icebergs, and grease ice, and floes. The years are passing here.

Within all of this bonkers writing, there are always images that arrest me – biting at the air for something worth breathing, one's bones unhinged and scattered from the height of an eagle, dressing in loose strings of stones – that I might identify with if I read them in a poem (and couldn't those three quotes I pulled stand alone as poems?): but the genius of Dillard is that she guides me through the process, introducing me to those scientists and deep thinkers who have informed her own philosophy, so that when she takes that step beyond the brink of pure reason, that's a step I can take with her. Nobody does it better. As a “carefully curated” collection of Dillard's best writing, how could I give The Abundance fewer than five stars?