The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New
The essays that made a generation of nature writers, including Living Like Weasels and Total Eclipse, refusing every consolation the subject matter invites.
Dillard looks hard at animals, weather and mortality across four decades of essays, and refuses the consolations her subject matter invites. The selection spans her whole career, and the prose is deliberately unsettling: nature appears here not as comfort but as the largest available evidence that the world was not arranged for us. She is at her best when something in it refuses to be beautiful.
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Maria Popova
A century and a half after Whitman, Annie Dillard looks to another animal for a model of how to live these human lives. Having let a muskrat be her teacher in unselfconsciousness, 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, later included in The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New (public library) — one of my all-time favorite books.
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