Sam Anderson's Eloquent Tribute to Annie Dillard

Sam Anderson’s tribute to Annie Dillard in today’s New York Times Magazine is excellent. Anderson says, 

Dillard was undistillable. But one of her major lessons, the bass note anchoring every chord she played, is simple. She was here to remind us that, if you really look hard, nothing is boring, nothing is normal — not mothers, fathers, bicycles, cities, beetles, weasels or rocks. She would fling her awareness out into the world like an extremely eccentric hawk, letting us marvel at its loops and dives before she called it back home.

Anderson creates a wonderful concept to get at Dillard’s particular brand of magic – mind-voice. He writes, 

Maybe this is naïve. Maybe it’s the grief talking. But the biographical absence of Annie Dillard does very little to diminish the living presence of Annie Dillard. Because to read her work involves more than just decoding words on a page. It involves sitting, in extremely close contact, with a wild and living thing, a mind-voice — a being that rises out of the text like a murmuration of starlings rises out of a field. To this day, Dillard’s mind-voice remains as real and urgent and alive as the one in our own heads. 

"Mind-voice" is exactly the right description of Dillard’s magnificent prose. Consciousness was her great subject. 

I’ll post my own tribute to Dillard in the coming days. Right now, I just want to tip my hat to Anderson for his eloquent salute to her.

Postscript: The above portrait of Annie Dillard is by Jill Krementz.