I’m glad I finally got around to reading Annie Dillard, starting with a collection of her narrative essays. I love the way she often starts with small details, weaving them together until they take on new meaning. Below is a particularly rich paragraph from the essay “Paganism”.

“The room where I live is plain as a skull, a firm setting for windows. A nun lives in the fires of the spirit, a thinker lives in the bright wick of the mind, an artist lives jammed in the pool of materials. But this room is a skull, a fire tower, wooden, and empty. Of itself it is nothing, but the view, as they say, is good.”