Lent Reading: Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I haven't read it since I was twelve or so -- it was a favourite book then, though I can't imagine what I saw in it. When I read it now it stirs no memories; I might as well be reading it for the first time. But I suspect all her writing is like that. She seems to see the world like that: clearly, ruthlessly, for the first time.

I've just finished the chapter on insects -- one of the chapters on insects, there are a lot of bugs in this book -- called "The Fixed." "Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly," she writes, "and insects it seems have to do one vile thing after another."

I am wholly in sympathy with Dillard -- as a tuning fork is in sympathy. She stirs me. She makes me want to give up on God. At the same time she is a great writer of faith (does she herself believe -- I don't know). I think any great work of faith must be a work of unfaith. An uncomfortable work (as, say, Job is). It is an uncomfortable world. So how can God be any smaller, any easier to live with?

I had an acute pain attack this week -- the first since my surgery last fall which was meant to prevent them for several years. It knocked me down. I mean that -- it knocked me off my feet. I may have screamed; certainly I was gone for a moment. And now I have that baffling displaced pain in one hip, one toe, some muscular stuff in between probably from holding myself tensely. I can hardly walk.

I don't know what to make of all this. But I am glad I'm reading this book.

Good Lent, everyone.