I spent the entirety of April '24 reading Annie Dillard’s The Living. Dense but infinitely rewarding, The Living is a treat in every sense of the word. Dillard, for me, isn’t just an author. She is a teller of rich and vivid stories, an acute capturer of human emotions, a deliverer of stunning landscapes, and a straight-forward sayer of facts. This is my first novel by her, and her first fiction novel. Primarily a non-fiction author, I didn’t think she would move me with her words as much as she did. With no dialogue and heaps of descriptive text, I found myself completely immersed in the Pacific Northwest and its peoples’ lives in the latter half of 1800s.

Now, I look at Mt. Baker, visible from everywhere in this sprawling city, and think of Dillard’s characters who are very much plucked from real life. I look at the same skies her characters must have looked at >100 years ago. I sail across the same rivers they caught their halibuts and salmons in. And while the May (when I initially wrote this review) skies never quite cleared up, I still find solace in this paragraph:

“…the sky cleared, and people's spirits rose. The frogs in the marshes were peeping in their thousands by dusk, cougars screamed by night, and early in the mornings the flickers called out, and answered. Mornings, the sun seemed to appear from anywhere at random, like a swallow. It rolled up the sides the of mountains and down the sides of mountains, range after range, around the world's east rim. Every afternoon it threw a new set of shadows and shine on the parlor wallpaper; every night it flew behind a different island. The sun is a creature who flits, young Clare Fishburn thought, the sun is a bee. Daylight pried the darkness and poured in; the whole beach was drunk and reeling on it.”

On finding that your crush also likes you:

“(He) apparently reciprocated her profoundest and most secret feelings, she thought she had never lived before, or knew what life could hold, or what absolute power one heart could exert upon another. She perceived no trace, fossil, or echo of this wild sensation anywhere around her, and concluded that (they) had invented it together, which would be, she thought, just like them.”

On learning how to die:

“He needed to learn how to die. He had learned everything else as it came along-how to read, drive a team, scythe a field and win- How grain, fall a tree, miter a corner, how to use and fix a lathe and a steam saw, demonstrate electromagnetism, set purlins for a roof, cut pipe to plumb a sink, machine an axle bearing, price a section, and sell a lot and he excelled at what he learned, and now he had to learn this next thing, to release it all. Was it not important! How does a man learn to die when the experts are mum?”