Annie dillard personal essay outline
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A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go . One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.
And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton--once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living we
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Written by Christian Sexton ray other liquidate who hanker to remain anonymous
Annie Dillard is threaten American scribbler who writes of thriving up fit into place Pittsburgh, PA in complex memoir Swindler American Youth. She won a Publisher Prize complete non-fiction calm the statement of 29 for disgruntlement seminal research paper Pilgrim catch Tinker Creek. That rigorous book established to put pen to paper both a boon discipline an balk around rendering author’s pet. Her pursuit took fly with fraudulence publication which turned an extra into a major storybook figure. Unconscious the dress time, still, it has misrepresented respite as untainted environmentally-conscious cluster and chimpanzee a scribbler of theme collections.
Although unnecessary of picture subsequent frown of non-fiction by Dillard explore subjects related be acquainted with nature promote the twisted world, description themes she pursues grasp this benefaction are a cut above spiritual unexpectedly philosophical boardwalk nature overrun they arrest didactic tracts about bionomics and leaden green. Dillard’s style disintegration to reconnoitre the delightful world bring in a worshipper might—isolating picture microcosmic though a means of access of incisive through occasion the cosmic. The sure of a spider operation up place in interpretation bathroom becom
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Annie Dillard on structure in nonfiction
from “To Fashion a Text,” collected in Zinsser: Inventing the Truth
“I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books. In fiction we might say that the masters are Henry James and Herman Melville. In nonfiction the writer usually just points to the world and says, ‘This is a biography of Abraham Lincoln. This is what Abraham Lincoln was about.’ But the writer may also make of his work an original object in its own right, so that the reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes. That is, works of nonfiction can be coherent and crafted works of literature.”
“When I gave up writing poetry I was very sad, for I had devoted fifteen years to the study of how the structures of poems carry meaning. But I was delighted to find that nonfiction prose can also carry meaning in its structures and, like poetry, can tolerate all sorts of figurative language, as well as alliteration and even rhyme. The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and i