This afternoon we returned from a few peaceful days at our friends’ home near Princeton, Il.  A detour allowed us a quick stop at Plow Creek Farm, site of last summer’s PAPA Festival, to pick raspberries.

As hoped for, our vacation days were lazily spent cooking, walking, playing, and reading.  Lots of reading.  Of the three books I brought, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life is the only one I finished and, as I told Maggie when the last page was read, I could have immediately started in again.

Like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, every sentence in this small book is beautifully crafted and most pages hold multiple moments of pause-worthy beauty and truth.  This may sound somewhat over the top, so for evidence I offer the final two paragraphs from the fifth chapter.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.  Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.  The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now.  Something more will arise for later, something better.  These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.  Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive.  Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.  You open your safe and find ashes.

After Michelangelo died, someone found in his studio a piece of paper on which he had written a note to his apprentice, in the handwriting of his old age: “Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.”

I hope you’ll read this book someday.  Though writers, preachers, and others who spend time with words will especially benefit from Dillard’s insight, anyone with an eye for moments of transcendence among the mundane will find much to enjoy in these pages.