The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New by Annie Dillard

The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New Reviews

• 
  sAmAnE

  این کتاب شامل پنج جستار درباره‌ی صداهایی که از طبیعت نمی‌شنویم و به کسانی که عاشق طبیعت هستند؛ پیشنهاد میکنم.
• 
  Hilda hasani

  بعداز سال‌ها نتوانستم کتابی را تمام کنم. دو جمله‌ی پشت سر هم را نمی‌توانستم دنبال کنم.
• 
  Hossein

  انقدر در این دنیای ساختگی خودمان غرق شده ایم که صدایی جز هیاهوی خالی از سکوت ماشین ها را نمی شنویم. آنقدر خودمان را زیر نور چراغ ها بیدار نگاه داشته ایم که خورشید را از یاد برده ایم. انقدر شب هایمان با نور های مصنوعی روشن بوده که لذت تجربه شب تاریکِ تاریکی که تنها نور مهتاب آن را روشن می کند را از یاد برده ایم. اغلب یادمان می رود که در کنار درختی که در پیاده روی خیابان است، درست بالای سرمان، پرنده ای لانه ساخته.
  دیگر صداهای طبیعت را نمی شنویم. صدای چیزها را. صدای پرنده ها، صدای حشرات، صدای باد وقتی که میان شاخه های درختان می پیچد و برگ ها را به هم می زند، صدای افتادن برگ از درخت... مدت زیادی گذشته از زمانی که دیگر موسیقی طبیعت را نمی شنویم. حتی سکوت را هم دیگر نمی شنویم.
  "هیچ چیز آنجا نیست" ، 5 جستار است درباره همين ها. مجموعه ای راهکار و توصیه نیست، بلکه شاید دعوتی باشد برای سهراب وار نگاه کردن به زندگی.،برای بهتر دیدن و شنیدن...
• 
  Rebecca

  For readers who are reasonably familiar with Dillard’s work, the selection given here might be a little disappointing. Why reread 60 pages from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I thought, when I have a copy of it up on the shelf? Rather than reading long portions of For the Time Being and Teaching a Stone to Talk, why not go find whole copies to read (which might help with understanding them in context)? None of Dillard’s poetry or fiction has been included, and the most recent piece, “This Is the Life,” from Image magazine, is from 2002. I wish there could have been more fresh material as an enticement for existing fans. However, this will serve as a perfect introduction for readers who are new to Dillard’s work and want a taste of the different nonfiction genres she treats so eloquently and mysteriously.
  
  See my full review at
  Shiny New Books.
• 
  Diane S ☔

  Annie Dillard's essay are my pause button, or my reset button. She makes me stop and think, look at what's around me, wonder at the everyday things in my life. I own all her books and whenever I get frustrated at the many things, because of my health, that I can no longer do, I read a few. Whether it is a solar eclipse, badgers, church music or the many things around us she has an interesting or amusing way of describing these things. I don't read more than a few in one sitting because they lose their sense of wonder that way. These are meant to savor, to read slowly, to stop and think, look and learn. She covers so many different subjects, notices so many different things, some are funny, such as the one where she visits Disneyland with a group of Chinese.
  
  I just hope she keeps writing, so I can keep reading her amazing insights.
  
  
• 
  Ellie

  هنوز هم که هنوزه باور نمی‌کنم که چیزی این چنین ویژه خونده باشم؛ مقدار شگفتیم از جستارها و لمس سکوت متن‌ها، به اندازه‌ای بود که موقع خوندن دوتا از اون‌ها «سفر اکتشافی به قطب» و «کسوف کامل»، اشک می‌ریختم و حس می‌کردم که خودم به جای نویسنده در اون تجارب حضور داشته‌ام. این جور متن‌ها در درونم تکاپو و شور عجیبی به وجود میاره؛ من رو از جهان پرهیاهو جدا می‌کنه و راه چاره‌ی «مشاهده و سکوت» رو جلوی پام می‌ذاره؛ آخ که چه قدر زیبایی و لطافت درون کلمات این کتاب نهفته بود.
• 
  Roya

  جدیدا به جستار روایی علاقمند شدم و از خوندن‌ِ جستارها با موضوعاتِ مختلف، لذت می‌برم.
  اما منی که عاشق و شیدای طبیعت و تک‌تکِ عناصرشم، توقعِ بیشتری از این کتاب داشتم‌. یه جاهایی نویسنده از جاده خارج میشد و آدم سر در گم میشد که "دقیقا داره راجع به چی می‌نویسه؟" ولی دوباره بر‌میگشت و نشونه‌هایی از مقصد می‌داد.
  الان ساعت 19:05 سومین روزِ زمستونه و بعد از پیاده‌روی زیرِ بارونِ محشر، برگشتم خونه و زیرِ لحاف گرم و نرمم خزیدم و همچنان که به صدای بارون گوش میدم و از بوی نارنگی مست میشم، کتاب رو تموم کردم و از اینکه نمی‌تونم زمان رو تو همین لحظه متوقف کنم، غمگینم🥲
  با اینکه بعضی جستارها حوصله‌سَربَر بود، ولی جستار "کسوف کامل" یه تنه ملال‌آور بودنِ جستارهای دیگه رو جبران کرد🥺😍
  توصیفات اونقدر دقیق بود که حس کردم کسوف رو به چشم دیدم!
  و اما قسمتِ موردعلاقه‌م از کتاب:😌
  "ناگهان، روی زمین و آسمان، شبی شد تاریک. توی آسمان شب حلقه‌ی باریکی از نور بود. روزنه‌ای که خورشید آنجاست خیلی کوچک است. صرفا حلقه‌ی باریکی از نور جایش را معلوم می‌کند. هیچ صدایی نیست. چشم‌ها خشک شده‌اند و رگ‌ها خالی شده‌اند و شش‌ها ایستاده‌اند. آن‌جا جهان وجود نداشت. ما آدم‌های مرده‌ی دنیا بودیم که دور خودمان می‌چرخیدیم و می‌گشتیم. روی پوسته‌ی سیاره خشک شده بودیم، در حالی که زمین به قهقرا می‌رفت. ذهن‌مان چندین سال نوری دورتر بود. تقریبا همه‌چیز را از یاد برده بودیم. اراده باید دست به عملی خارق‌العاده می‌زد که گذشته‌مان را به یادمان آورد، خودِ زنده‌ی ما را در بستر مادی و زمانیِ زندگی‌مان. از قرار معلوم، سیاره‌مان را دوست می‌داشتیم و خودمان را، ولی دیگر نمی‌توانستیم به یادبیاوریم که راه رسیدن به آن‌ها کجاست. نور ناجور بود. آسمان چیزی بود که نباید. در آسمان سیاه حلقه‌ای از نور بود. تمام بود‌."🌚
• 
  Domenico Fina

  Raccolta di saggi narrativi, prose d'occasione, scritti o come dir si voglia, di una scrittrice statunitense che non conoscevo e non era stata ancora tradotta in Italia, Annie Dillard, 73enne, nata a Pittsburgh, il titolo della racconta originale è "L'abbondanza" (2016), da noi tradotto per Bompiani da Andrea Asioli con il titolo "Ogni giorno è un Dio". Il titolo non rende esattamente l'idea, Annie Dillard appartiene a quel genere di scrittori americani dal guizzo tra meraviglia, natura, umorismo e folleggiamento, che vanno da Emerson ad Emily Dickinson, da Marianne Moore a Wallace Stevens fino a Lucia Berlin, ma il loro Dio è anzitutto l'immaginazione. Gli accostamenti lo so sono impegnativi, leggetela se vi va, poi saprete dirmi la vostra impressione, a mio avviso è una scrittrice strabiliante, ha vinto il Pulitzer già all'età di 30 anni, nel 1975. Ma non è questo il merito particolare. Il merito è il suo stupefacente occhio mobile, che passa dalla descrizione capolavoro di una Eclissi totale nel 1979 (il primo saggio del libro che da solo giustificherebbe la pubblicazione) a una descrizione della pelle flaccida dei suoi genitori, dalla morte di donnole e falene, all'avventura di un tale che la inseguì, da bambina, perché lo aveva preso a palle di neve, al senso delle barzellette complesse che raccontava suo padre, a un cervo catturato e alla reazione 'fredda' dell'autrice...
  
  
  Vi copio due pagine interessanti:
  
  "I nostri genitori e nonni, e tutti i loro amici, sembravano insensibili al loro difetto principale, la loro pelle flaccida. Noi bambini avevamo, per esempio, mani fatte come si deve; le nostre dita fluide, pieghevoli, erano attaccate alla loro pelle. Gli adulti avevano mani deformi, occhiute, dalla pelle allentata come ossa in una sacca; era sorprendente che riuscissero ad aprire barattoli. Avevano pelle allentata dovunque, tranne che ai polsi e alle caviglie, come conigli. Eravamo interi; eravamo gradevoli ai nostri occhi. I nostri occhi cristallini rilucevano dentro orbite salde. Gli adulti stavano cadendo a pezzi, ma non ci facevano caso, né se ne davano pena. La mia ripugnanza era sgarbata, quindi la nascondevo. Inoltre non avremmo mai potuto raggiungere l'assoluto splendore figurale che essi solo potevano di tanto in tanto conseguire. La nostra bellezza era mera assenza di decrepitudine; la loro bellezza, quando l'avevano, non era passiva ma guadagnata; era magnificenza. La nostra bellezza era, nel lungo termine, meramente elfica."
  
  "Nostro padre ci insegnò la cultura in cui eravamo nate. La cultura americana era in primo luogo dixieland, dixieland puro e semplice, e dopo il dixieland, jazz.
  La nostra cultura era il crollo della borsa - il più grandioso crollo che paese abbia mai avuto. Papà spiegava le dinamiche del crollo alla piccola Amy e a me, intorno al tavolo della sala da pranzo. Cercava di spiegare perché a Wall Street gli uomini si buttavano dal grattacielo quando la borsa crollò: "Hanno perso tutto!" - ma ovviamente io pensavo che avevano perso tutto solo saltando. La nostra cultura era le file per la distribuzione dei viveri della Depressione, e gli Okies in fuga dal Dust Bowl, e i fieri elemosinanti per le strade cittadine, e le famiglie che migravano in cerca di lavoro, - donne polverose, uomini dai cappelli neri tirati sugli occhi, bambini spiritati, affamati: che spettacolo sconcertante, questa miseria quasi universale, famiglie urbane che vivevano dentro le auto, famiglie contadine che mangiavano insetti - perché? Perché tutti gli uomini d'affari si accorsero all'improvviso, lo stesso mattino, che il denaro cartaceo era solo carta. Che sciocchi patentati. Cos'altro credevano che fosse?"
• 
  El

  I didn't know the name Annie Dillard until right before I moved to Pittsburgh. Someone I worked with at the hospital in Missouri overheard me talking about my upcoming move and said he read a Pittsburgh author named Annie Dillard. The nerd that I am, I was like, "Do tell me more!" It was through him that her name was on my radar.
  
  When I read her, I fell in love. When my brother and I moved here, we drove around the neighborhood she wrote about in An American Childhood and tried to guess which house might have been hers. Now I live literally within walking distance of those streets, and I think of her anytime I'm over there or in Frick Park.
  
  It's not an exaggeration to say that discovering Annie Dillard helped put me on this path I am on currently, which is working on my MFA with a concentration in creative nonfiction. Yes, Dillard is one of the authors who made me realize that this is what I want to do with the same skill and craft.
  

  I close my eyes and I see stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper stars bowing to deepest stars at the crown of an infinite core.
  

  (p162, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

  
  I was excited when I saw the subtitle to this collection: "Narrative Essays Old and New." But I didn't realize that the essays included here are mostly taken from other sources and are, sadly, edited down to fulfill the purpose of this book. There are excerpts from An American Childhood, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and The Writing Life, and also excerpts from some of her lesser-known larger works.
  
  I have difficulty with this sort of editing. You know how there are abridged versions of Moby Dick where they take out all that stuff about whale blubber that is really unnecessary? You'd think it would be great, right? Like, all the fun of Moby Dick without all the boring parts. Except I want to read the boring parts because that's what the author intended. Don't abridge shit for me, don't water it down.
  
  I'm not saying this is quite the same thing. I think the purpose here is to reach readers who have not experienced Dillard before. This is certainly a good starting point. Like, if you've heard about Dillard, and you're not sure you want to read her, so you want a mini-essay to get a taste, then sure. This is the book for you. And you should get a taste of Dillard. She's great.
  

  I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood.
  

  (p148, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

  
  But what bothers me is that someone might pick this up for exactly that reason and then feel the essays are disjointed or seemingly incomplete, or a piece may not make complete sense as a self-contained essay, and they get completely turned off. That's a problem because Dillard's narrative essays are so rich with detail and description and that doesn't always come through in this collection with the way the essays have been trimmed.
  
  On the other hand, for those of us who have read Dillard more completely, but it's been a while, this is an okay collection to recapture some of our possibly favorite scenes from her larger works. Her essay about running through Frick Park and her neighborhood being chased by a young businessman after throwing a snowball at his passing vehicle is one of the best damn things I've read and I refer to it in my mind so frequently. Would I care as much if I wasn't familiar with the neighborhood? That's hard to say, but I feel her description of it was so solid that it took me right to her childhood as though I was there.
  
  In a way, Dillard is one of the best teachers I've ever had, though I've never met her. She came to me at the right time and, as I have already said, she put me on a course I didn't even realize until just recently, almost 15 years after moving here and being told about her by some guy I worked with at an old job in what feels like a completely different life at this point.
  

  It was an immense discovery pounding into my hot head with every sliding, joyous step, that this ordinary adult evidently knew what I thought only children who trained at football knew: that you have to fling yourself at what you're doing, you have to point yourself, forget yourself, aim, dive.
  

  (p68-69, from An American Childhood)
• 
  Book Riot Community

  ALL HAIL THE QUEEN. I once had a friend insist I read an Annie Dillard book before I could stay with her when I visited NYC, and I am still thankful she made that demand because it changed my life! Dillard is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, and has been chronicling life, both the mundane and the fascinating aspects, for decades. She has an amazing ability to deconstruct everything she sees and beautifully describe it, whether it's her childhood, or poetry, or nature. If you've never read her, I would recommend you check her out immediately. She's nothing short of a genius.
  
  
  Tune in to our weekly podcast dedicated to all things new books, All The Books:
  http://bookriot.com/category/all-the-...
• 
  Ardavan Bayat

  خوانش: 1401.01.16
  4 از 5
  
  شوربختانه یا خوشبختانه من چنین نوشته‌هایی را همیشه با خود دارم در ذهنم. گاهی می‌نویسمشان و گاهی در نوشته‌های دیگران حس می‌کنم نوشته‌ی خودم را می‌خوانم. با خواندن انگاره‌های ذهنی‌ام در نوشته‌های دیگران به این می‌اندیشم که او به چه چیزی می‌نگریسته یا چه برایش رخ داده که توانسته همان انگاره‌های مرا به نگارش بکشد و این هم رازی ست برای خود. گمان می‌کنم اگر بدانم کسی مرا نمی‌بیند خیلی بیش از اندازه به جلوه‌های طبیعت خیره می‌شوم. از دیدن درختان برهنه‌ی اسفندماه که جوانه‌های سبز ریز روی تنه‌های هرس‌شده‌شان روییده تا دراز کشیدن زیر ستارگان در شبی سرد و کویری.
  
  در میان نوشته‌های دیلارد سه جستار بیش از همه دوست‌داشتنی بود: «دیدن»، «سفر اکتشافی به قطب» و «کسوف کامل». در کسوف کامل خود را روی تپه حس می‌کردم با اینکه هرگز کسوف کاملی را خود به یاد ندارم! بهترین بخش این جستار جایی بود که خورشید ناپدید می‌شد و تاریکی به‌تندی به نویسنده نزدیک می‌شد. ولی یکی از نقدهایی که به نویسنده دارم این است که گونه‌ای روده‌درازی در دل نوشته‌ها بود که نیاز به هرس داشت تا به مانند درختان نیرویی برای کِشش دیدگان بینندگان (ذهن خوانندگان) دست‌وپا کند. با این همه آنچنان که برخی نوشته‌اند ملال‌انگیز نبود.
  
  
  فهرست:
  
  سخن مترجم
  
  1. زندگی همین است: کسی همه‌ی داستان را نشنیده‌است
  (بدک نبود)
  
  2. دیدن: به احساساتم بازمی‌گردم.
  (جستار جالبی بود البته اندکی روده‌درازانه هم بود! چنین تجربیاتی داشته‌ام... چنین وقت‌هایی گویی زمان هم می‌ایستد.)
  
  3. سفر اکتشافی به قطب: بلندای فکر و پوچی واقعیت
  (گاهی جالب و گاهی کسل‌کننده.)
  
  4. کسوف کامل: نجات زندگی با دستور زبان و کلمه
  (تجربه‌ی بسیار خوبی بود)
  
  5. آموزش مکالمه به سنگ: جنب‌وجوشی در سکوت
  (بد نبود)
• 
  Cheeman Validi

  «عشق، برای خاطر خود، بدون آنکه معشوقی در کار باشد، آغاز می گردد.»
  -سفر اکتشافی به قطب-
  
  قشنگ بودی.
• 
  Ramin Azodi

  حس و حال این کتاب مثل ظهر یه روز تعطیل تابستونیه که مطلقن هیچ‌کاری برای انجام دادن ندارید، به سقف زل زدید و در حالتی خلسه‌گون بین خواب و بیداری در رفت و آمدید ولی نهایتن جز ملال و کسالت و خلسه چیزی گیرتون نمیاد
• 
  Paul

  Anne Dillard is very different to most people. When they look at the world around them they only see a fraction of what is actually there, she relentlessly absorbs every detail of the place and experience. But her true skill lies in taking what she has seen and writing about it with tight, and sharp prose. In this new collection, Dillard writes about subjects as wide-ranging and diverse as solar eclipses, the family jokes, the bundle of energy that is the weasel, as well as essays on skin, tsunamis and about the Victorian expeditions to the North Pole.
  
  Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
  
  Her sense of fascination and wonder at the things she sees permeates the book with all the subjects she talks about, making this a wonderful thing to read. My favourite essay was the one titled ‘For The Time Being’, about that material that most do not consider, sand. In her unique way, we find out how many grains of sand are created every moment, how it flows with water down to the sea before transforming back to rock over countless millennia. We learn that the sharpest items are not always metal and that they took hundreds of small blows to form these exquisite stone implements. This is the second book of Dillard’s that I have read now and I am finding that I am liking her writing more and more. Her penetrating gaze at the world around is brilliantly complemented by her precise prose. Whilst I realise that some of these have been published before, this is a fine introduction to her work who hasn’t read anything of her work before.
• 
  Negar Afsharmanesh

  کتاب رو دوست داشتم جستار هایی بود مه بیشتر درمون مایه اش درباره طبیعت بود حالا از طبیعت انسان که جستار اول بود گرفته تا طبیعت زمین سیاره ای که توش زندگی میکنیم خیلی شیرین و خوندنی بود و کوتاه که راحت خونده میشد.
• 
  Tahmineh Baradaran

  مجموع پنج جستار درباره طبیعت واحساسات است . من جستارکسوف را پسندیدم . شاید چون تجربه کسوف کامل همیشه در ذهنم ترسناک بوده واگر انسانی اولّیه بودم با ناآگاهی از دلیل کسوف شاید ازترس می مردم . در حد ترسم اززلزله ..
  کسوف ناقص خیلی جالب است . تقریبا هیچ ربطی به کسوف کامل ندارد. مثل ربط بوسیدن یک نفرباازدواج کردن بااو یا ربط پرواز کردن با هواپیما با سقوط کردن ازآن . (ص 95 )
  به حدس من ، لحن غنایی قوی جستارها کارترجمه رامشکل کرده است . خواندن متن ادبی چیزی است وترجمه آن دیگر .
  جستارسفراکتشافی به قطب :
  سالهای سال ، من درپی قطب دسترسی ناپذیری نسبی بودم . (؟ ص 78 )
  بایدبگویم که مجبورم دوباره بارسفرببندم.روزها ومعناها معلق اند ....همه ی نظام های ناکافی یخ رابه هم می ریزند (؟ ص 81 )
  جستارکسوف :
  شاید خوانده باشید که ماه درکسوف یک کارهایی میکند .من تا حالا هیچ وقت ماه ندیده ام .(!؟ ص 96 )
  
  نام اصلی کتاب را بیشترپسندیدم : for the time being
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Emma

  breath taking! no words do it justice really, just a book of wonder
• 
  Mohammad

  هیچ چیز در این کتاب نیست
• 
  Mojtaba Shirani

  نشر اطراف نشر فوق العاده خوبیه فضا سازی نویسنده فوق العاده است در این کتاب
• 
  Mohadese Shahsvnd

  فکر می‌کنم جستار چهارم یعنی کسوف کامل را از همه بیشتر پسندیدم، شگفتی و تمام حس‌هایش آدم را به دنبال خودش می‌کشید، و این همراهی تجربه‌ی عجیب و شیرینی بود.
• 
  Razieh mehdizadeh

  کتاب هیچ چیز آنجا نیست.
  مطلقا یک هیچ بزرگ.
  گاهی گوش دادن به صدای سکوت- اهی کویین دراما شدن و ماجراهای سانتی مانتال نگاه کردن به کوه های یخی و نور آفتاب و... درکل هیچ لذتی نبردم و مثل این بود که یک فیلم یا عکس باکیفیت را تلاش کنی با کلمات ظریف و بادقت توضیح دهی. مدیوم که بسیار جذاب تر وجود دارد.
  .
  نویسنده کنار رودخانه ای کوچک پرسه می زده و یادداشت های هر روزه اش را می نوشته.
  .
  مراوده های بسیار ظریف با ملال طوری که احساس می کنید عصر یک روز تعطیل است و هیچ کاری ندارید جز گوش دادن به وزوز مگس ها،چشم دوختن به دیوار رو به رو و خیال ورزی
  .
  زندگی همین است. کسی همه ی داستان ها رانشینده است.
  .
  دیدن: به احساساتم بازمی گردم. ( فراموش کردن دیدن های واقعی) تماشای ظرافت هایی که زا یاد برده ایم در سرعت و تکنولوژی و زندگی شهری
  .
  اخیرا نویسنده ای به من توصی کرد ذهنم را آرام کنم و به ساقه های بریده شده ای که دسته دسته در علفزارها پیدا می شوند توجه کنم.
  .
  همیشه فکر می کردم اگر به اندازه ی کافی دقت کنم باد را خواهم دید: محو، سخت فهم، ته مانده ای زیبا از گریز هوا.
  بعد از اختراع عمل آب مروارید که خیلی ها توانتسند بهتر بببنید: درختی را دیدم که در آن نور هست. روی علف هایی که در آن ها نور بودف ایستادم.
  .
  سفر اکتشافی به قطب همراه با یکی درمیان در خشکی و در کلیسا و تعبیر و تشبیه های مشابه.
  .
  مجبور نیستید بیرون از تاریکی بنشیند اما اگر به هرحال می خواهید ستاره ها را ببیند تاریکی ضروری ست.
  .
  در شمالگان چیزی به اسم فضای سه بعدی قابل تشخیص نبود. خورشید هیچ وقت غروب نمی کرد و هیچ چیز دیگری هم دیده نمی شد. فقط یخ. خط افق پیدا نبود. زمین و آب و انعکاس شان در هم فرورفته بودند.
  خیال ورزی در عصر یک روز تعطیل
  
• 
  Caitlin

  Imagine you are a teenage girl in the early 2000s. You love books. You spend hours at the local thrift shop where you stand in the book aisle, exploring the shelves of books, even smelling them. You have no computer. You know nothing about the internet. Books are your only way to connect to the world.
  
  One day, in your high school English class, you read Annie Dillard's "
  The Death of a Moth." You feel on fire, like the moth that is consumed by the candle flame in the essay. You feel astonished for days, weeks, you wish the feeling would last your whole life. Years later, after high school and college, you still think about the essay, about the electric experience of reading it for the first time. Maybe you read it again but you'd prefer that it live in your memory as a white-hot wound, a tear in your consciousness formed by words.
  
  "The Death of a Moth" is not in Annie Dillard's latest collection of essays,
  The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New, but several of the book's pieces attain similar heights of poetry and revelation. Whether Dillard is writing about an eclipse or a dying deer, she has the masterful ability to communicate the sublimity and brutality of nature.
  
  The collection's strongest essay is the first one, "
  Total Eclipse", taken from
  Teaching a Stone to Talk. It recounts Dillard's terrifying and exhilarating experience of seeing an eclipse in Washington state in 1979.  In her signature sensory language, Dillard captures the eclipse with such evocative precision, relaying the moment when the world goes black and something we always thought was permanent--the sun--disappears:
  

  Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. For the hole where the sun belongs is very small. Just a thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth tolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything. Only an extraordinary act of will could recall to us our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. The light was wrong. In the sky was something that should not be there. In the black sky was a ring of light. It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone. There were stars. It was over.

  
  Few writers rival Dillard when it comes to passages like this one. Few writers can grab a moment with their bare hands and inspect it and cradle it and give it back to us in language. Her description of the total eclipse reminded me of a scene in Virginia Woolf's
  A Writer's Diary. After witnessing an eclipse in 1927, Woolf wrote
  

  Then one looked back again at the blue; and rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker and darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank and sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; and we thought now it is over--this is the shadow; when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment; and the next when as if a ball had rebounded the cloud took colour on itself again, only a sparkly ethereal colour and so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down and suddenly raised up when the colours came.

  
  Dillard's gift is in writing the "astonishing moment," in seeking it out and standing in it and giving her experience of it. While some people may be tempted to romanticize nature, Dillard always reminds us of the violence lurking in the depths of its beauty.
  
  One particularly haunting essay is "The Deer at Providencia," also from
  Teaching a Stone To Talk. It traces Dillard's excursion into a jungle in Ecuador where she sees a deer tied up by local villagers. The deer dies a slow and painful death with a rope around its neck and three of its legs; this way of killing the deer releases a chemical that makes the meat very tender when its cooked. The villagers plan to eat the deer that night. Dillard is accompanied by several men who are shocked by the suffering of the deer. Dillard is not visibly upset and the men are surprised at her stoic reaction. Dillard writes that "These things are not issues. They are mysteries." Nature contains great pain and suffering and these things coexist with life, with beauty.
  
  Another essay that stands out is "A Writer in the World" from
  The Writing Life. It contains stunning pieces of advice--almost like a modern version of 
  Letters to a Young Poet --for anyone who wants to dedicate their life to the written word. Dillard writes that "There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment." She also insists
  

  Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

  
  Such passages speak to Dillard's own passion, her own intensity, her own burning in the world. She is consumed by the fire of language and she passes that fire to all of us.
  
  As strong as the collection is, it does have its weak points. Material from the exacerbating and bewildering
  Holy the Firm lack the power of her other work. At times, certain essays don't fully cohere but, on the whole, this is an excellent collection filled with finely-crafted writing that will enchant, move, and electrify any reader, just like it did for me so many years ago. If you're new to Dillard, this is a perfect introduction. If you're an old fan, there is little that will disappoint.
  
  
• 
  Walker

  Collected works of a glorious writer, one who is a friend of silence, nature, and the lifelong exploration of what it means to be human in this world. Pulling from many of her longer works, this book provides the reader a taste of childhood memories like pelting cars with snowballs in Pittsburgh, a gateway into places from rural Virginia to Asia to the North Pole, and an introduction into her writing philosophy. That sentence alone should prove that Dillard can set her sights on many topics and write with passion about all of them.
  In honor of 2020, in which I have embraced Goodreads and its Reading Challenge, I quote Dillard: “why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened, and it’s deepest mystery probed?” It’s a glorious reminder.
  And finally, as 2020 has prevented much adventures, I quote Dillard in top form: “Polar explorers-one gathers from their accounts-sought at the Poles something of the sublime...They found it the only way it can be found, here or there... For they were people-all of them, even the British-and despite the purity of their conceptions, they man-hauled their humanity to the poles along with them. ... [For all humans,] wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand-that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.”
• 
  Beth Bonini

  You need to know that The Abundance is a collection of essays which span at least twenty years of writing - and include selections from seven different books, but primarily from Teaching a Stone to Talk, An American Childhood, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and For the Time Being. If you have most or all of those books, there isn't much point in buying this one (unless you are a mega-fan, of course); but if you have never read Annie Dillard, this collection is a brilliant place to start. You will get a great sense of her material, her voice, her concerns and her preoccupations.
  
  Dillard is a poetic essayist who examines, primarily, the natural world - but one gets the sense that her intellectual curiosity and interests are broad. There is a lot of science, a lot of history, plenty of geography and astronomy and botany, and so many interesting observations of insect and animal life in Dillard's musings. There is also much religion and philosophy, because everything that Dillard writes about is philosophical to some extent. She is always exploring consciousness and wondering why we are here - and what's it all about; life, I mean. Her preoccupations are 'seeing' and being properly alive to the world around us. If you are not of a similar philosophical bent, I can imagine you might find her a bit barmy. Her essays tend to meander - beautifully so, to my mind - but she does like to connect not obviously 'like' things. In the introduction to this collection, Geoff Dyer says that Dillard "is a writer of exceptional clarity, even when we are struggling to grasp the meaning of what is being said so clearly, so brightly." I think this assessment is spot-on. I didn't understand everything, but like good poetry, I just liked the sound of the words. I read this book with a pencil in hand, and I cannot think of when I have underlined or starred so many passages and phrases in a book. You can read these essays over and over again, and probably always find new meaning in them.
• 
  Marisa

  I tried on this one, I really did, but after 100 pages I was done. Trying to read this book felt like reading the journal of the high school girl who thought she was artsy. Each essay dragged on and seemed to be fascinated both with its own language and over describing each aspect of the scene. The dead flies in the bathroom confirmed to me that I do not think I’d get along with Dillard in real life. I just don’t think I can see the same level of philosophy in her observations.
  
  I don’t know what Dillard’s other writing is like and I’d probably give it a shot, but these essays just were not for me.
  
  Who should read it? Only people who know they’re fans of Anne Dillard.
  
  See all my reviews and more at
  www.ReadingtoDistraction.com or @Read2Distract
• 
  Cally Mac

  The prose was so beautiful and I really enjoyed this — if I was in the mood for it. If I couldn’t fully, fully concentrate on it or wasn’t quite in the mood for it the writing was so ethereal that I realised I’d just be reading and have no idea what she was actually talking about.
• 
  Sedighe Vazehi

  تصویر و صداهایی از طبیعت که شاید هیچ وقت فرصت دیدن و شنیدنش رو نداشته باشیم.
• 
  Shaghayegh.l3

  حین خوندنش معلق بودم؛ می‌خوندم اما وصل نمی‌شدم به نوشته‌ها. شاید این کتاب من نبود، شاید وقت دیگه‌ای.
• 
  Krista

  They will question thee concerning what they should expend.
  Say: The Abundance.
  
  ~The Qur'an, Sura of The Cow

  
  
  The Abundance is subtitled “Narrative Essays Old and New”, and for the most part, these “essays” are excerpts from the books of Annie Dillard that I have read before. Repeatedly, I was delighted to rediscover those passages that I had loved upon first reading (passages that I quoted from copiously the first time around), and as a collection, I think this is a really fine book: anyone not already familiar with Dillard would get a fascinating sampling, and we who are longtime fans are reminded of the best bits. Because I have already reviewed many of the books excerpted here, I'm just going to pull some new quotes that I enjoyed this time around.
  
  The Foreword is written by Geoff Dyer, and in it, he attempts to explain what is unique about Dillard's writing:
  
  

  On the humor front it helps, also, that Dillard's pretty much a fruitcake. In an insightful review of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Eudora Welty confessed that at certain points “I honestly do not know what she is talking about”. And Pilgrim is far from being Dillard's most difficult or nuttiest offering; that honor would have to go to Holy the Firm (really bonkers and all the more enjoyable for it). Incomprehension is usually the result of obfuscation, the words refusing to slip into focus; Dillard, however, remains a writer of exceptional clarity, even when we are struggling to grasp the meaning of what is being said so clearly, so brightly.

  
  And that's the thing: as much as I have been moved by Dillard's writing, it's impossible not to recognise that she's a “fruitcake”, “nutty”, and “bonkers”; but she's merely putting into words the ways in which we're all not quite aligned with whatever it is that “reality” is supposed to be. Here she is writing about what it is to be an adolescent, and for whatever reason, this bit made me catch my breath this time around:
  
  

  I envied people in books who swooned. For two years I felt myself continuously swooning and continuously unable to swoon. The blood drained from my face and eyes and flooded my heart; my hands emptied, my knees unstrung, I bit at the air for something worth breathing – but I failed to fall, and I couldn't find the way to black out. I had to live on the lip of a waterfall, exhausted.

  
  Repeatedly, Dillard shares the scientific consensus on some aspect of nature (while always keeping the science human by including biographical details about the scientists themselves), and then in a reversal, she uses poetic devices in her prose to reconfigure the actual as metaphor. In one essay, Dillard tells the story of a farmer who shot an eagle out of the sky (and despite being someone who is drawn to and spends much time in raw nature, Dillard is always sanguine in the face of animal death and suffering), and when the bird was recovered, it was found with the jaws of a weasel clamped around its throat; the rodent's body having been, apparently, eaten away alive by the stricken bird; those relentless jaws never unclamping even unto death. At the end of this essay, Dillard concludes:
  
  

  I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going to no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you aloft even, till your eyes burn out and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from high as eagles.

  
  In the final essay, Dillard goes back and forth between her experience at a Catholic folk mass that is followed by a Baptism, and tales from last century's polar expeditions. These two seemingly unrelated narratives seesaw back and forth until Dillard conflates the two, imagining that the church's floor is covered in ice; that she is drifting on an ice floe, surrounded by the other parishioners and the resurrected bodies of lost explorers, and by the time it's done, the whole thing makes perfect existential sense.
  
  

  My name is Silence. Silence is my bivouac, and my supper sipped from bowls. I robe myself each morning in loose strings of stones. My eyes are stones; a chip from the pack ice fills my mouth. My skull is a polar basin; my brain pan grows glaciers, and icebergs, and grease ice, and floes. The years are passing here.

  
  Within all of this bonkers writing, there are always images that arrest me – biting at the air for something worth breathing, one's bones unhinged and scattered from the height of an eagle, dressing in loose strings of stones – that I might identify with if I read them in a poem (and couldn't those three quotes I pulled stand alone as poems?): but the genius of Dillard is that she guides me through the process, introducing me to those scientists and deep thinkers who have informed her own philosophy, so that when she takes that step beyond the brink of pure reason, that's a step I can take with her. Nobody does it better. As a “carefully curated” collection of Dillard's best writing, how could I give The Abundance fewer than five stars?
• 
  Amir

  مترجم توی مقدمه تعریف می‌کنه که نویسنده آن سال‌های دور حوالی نهر کوچیکی حوالی خونه‌ش توی ویرجینیا قدم می‌زده و یادداشت روزانه می‌نوشته. از تجربه‌ها و فکرهاش. یک وقتی تصمیم می‌گیره از بین اون یادداشت‌ها که حجم‌شون به بیست جلد می‌رسیده، کتابی بکشه بیرون. «زائر نهر کریک». کریک اسم همون نهره‌س. کتاب پولیتزر می‌بره. جستار معرکه‌ی «دیدن» از همین کتابه. تجربه‌ی شگفت‌انگیزی بود برام این جستار.
  کتاب هیچ چیز آن‌جا نیست پنج جستار از کتاب‌های مختلف نویسنده‌س. فضای کتاب دلخواه من بود؛ انزوا و تنهایی‌ای که داشت، طبیعتش، تماشا و توصیف اون طبیعتش و فکر و خیالی که با و توی طبیعت پر و بال می‌گیره. مترجم این‌جوری معرفی می‌کنه کتاب رو: «آن‌چه قرار است بخوانید، معجونی است از دقت و حواس‌پرتی، از واقعیت و خیال، و از هیجان و ملال. ذهن‌تان را پر می‌کند از صداها، رنگ‌ها و معناها ولی یک دفعه سرتان را بالا می‌آورید و می‌بینید «هیچ چیز آن‌جا نیست».
  جستار آخر «آموزش مکالمه به سنگ» رو، خود سایت اطراف گذاشته؛
  
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