please consume me
This Week in Reading
The Abundance by Annie Dillard
Very few people write about nature well, and Annie Dillard is one of them. Nature offers a richness of detail that is impossible to even approach. To try to represent not only the shape of a leaf but also its perfect buttery shade of green, its thinnest edge, the way the light filters through its milky, translucent surface, the minute tremble as we approach it, the scent of new growth-- where does one begin? And that is just one leaf— what about the tree it is on, the soil beneath the tree, the insects that make themselves at home in that soil, the dampness of the air? Overwhelmed by the incredible detail of nature, we fall back on romantic platitudes. We speak of beauty and peace as if those concepts can even begin to encompass the infinite specificity before us.
Computer programmers and artists try to write code that will simulate coral growth or root systems. Set designers make artificial trees for movie sets and theme parks, but these things are never as whole, as endlessly detailed, as the things they attempt to recreate.
I used to hate flowers, thought they were too obviously beautiful. There is nothing interesting about a flower. Now the camera roll on my phone is half photos of flowers in my neighborhood. Bursts of fuchsia against chipped retaining walls, perfect alien shapes. I say I am the neighborhood flower watch. I don’t have anything interesting to say about them, I don’t even have the ability to identify the different varieties, but I can watch them. I can bear witness to something so pure, so complete, that a human could have had no hand in its creation.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, which means that I grew up hiking and camping and skiing. My family spent a pretty average amount of time outdoors for a northwest family, though quite a bit more than most Americans. After graduation I really leaned into being a wilderness bitch. I wanted to be the sort of person who backpacked all the time, so I bought a new pack and started spending weekends alone, listening to audiobooks and setting my tent up high in the mountains. I spent a summer in Alaska, skinny dipping in alpine lakes and spending 80 percent of my time outside.
At the root of all of my outdoor excursions is a desire to be consumed. I want to be absorbed by the mountains and the ocean and the forest. I want to be an offering, but so often I am the consumer instead.
Annie Dillard captures this chase for wonderment. She gives the world a shakedown, searching for a sense of awe. All she wants, is to be overwhelmed. It is a lot to ask for.
Her essays are about nature, but they are also about her. Humans have no objective perspective on the natural world. The only writing about nature worth reading is when it is explored within the framework of personal experience. A tree falling with no one to hear it is silent. We cannot know the natural world except through ourselves. That is what makes Annie Dillard so special— she is so present, so visible. At her best moments she is both consumed, and the consumer, devouring splendor.
The wild offers a type of wonder that the city can never match. Civilization was born from the human mind. I can crane my head upwards towards the top of a skyscraper and be impressed by its scale, but I understand how it got there. There is no mystery to the regularity of human design.
In contrast— nature is terror. Mount Rainier is staggering, but it is also an active volcano, set to destroy the city of Seattle. The Pacific is gorgeous, but my parents taught me to never turn my back to the ocean. You can love nature, but you can never trust it. Its capacity for destruction is equal to its capacity for beauty. Perhaps it even enhances it, gives it a ragged fierceness that is impossible to control, or even explain. Annie Dillard understands that, understands that to be faced with such extreme beauty is a type of horror. When I ask to be overwhelmed, I am asking for something that is beyond articulation. For once, let me not comprehend.
I was back in the northwest for Christmas. My first morning home, my parents and I went to a matinee movie, the absolute earliest showing of Star Wars available. Heading out of the theater three hours later, I veered to the right, towards the enormous glass window by the concession stand. “What is it?” my dad asked. “The mountains! Look at them!” Above the half empty mall parking lot, above the dark ridge of trees, the Olympic Mountains loomed, snow capped in the distance. I hadn’t seen them in months. A tiny moment of awe, right there in the movie theater at Northgate Mall.
After a minute I turned away from the window, rode the escalator down to the parking garage, discussing if Star Wars was good or not with my dad. There is always that moment after wonder, when we turn our backs on the spectacular. How do we decide we are done with awe? How long do we spend staring at a painting in a museum, or stand shivering at the scenic viewpoint? Their magnificence is eternal, but still, we leave the Grand Canyon. Annie Dillard knows this too. At the end of her essay about the total eclipse she writes “one turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.” Every time I go back to Washington, I wonder how I ever left a place where beauty is so readily available. And then, every time, I leave again.
If you have ever felt compelled to read Thoreau, don’t, and read Annie Dillard instead. My only criticism is that this book is so clearly Good Writing that it can sometimes be a little exhausting to push forward. It is perhaps a book best sampled an essay at a time, rather than absorbed in long focused sittings. If you just read one essay, read "Total Eclipse."
Further Reading
The only other people I have found that should be allowed to write about nature are Mary Oliver, Cheryl Strayed and Rebecca Solnit.
I prefer Mary Oliver’s poems to her essays, but her essay collection that came out last year, Upstream, is delicate and sweet and tender. If you want a poem, the last stanza of "Starfish" has been repeating in my brain for the last seven years.
Wild by Cheryl Strayed was basically the book of the last decade, but it completely lived up to the hype for me (my mom finds this book unbearable, but she is also a huge grump whose official stance on camping is “I lived in a tent in a refugee camp, why would I do that for fun.”)
The first half of Savage Dreams by Rebecca Solnit is about nuclear testing in Nevada and the second half is about the establishment of Yosemite. I genuinely think this book changed my life.