I first encountered Annie Dillard while raising a family in Greece. I started with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and then moved on to Holy the Firm, The Writing Life, and Teaching a Stone to Talk. I liked her blend of descriptions of forays into the outdoors or travel to distant lands juxtaposed with incidents from her life, philosophical observations, and occasional surrealistic flights of fancy. What provoked me to reread this book was a personal reflection on old age: how it seems to speed up time. Days, weeks, months, seasons, and years go by much quicker, in my perception, than they used to. And this insight caused me to recall a passage I once read in a Dillard essay in which she is vacationing with a nine-year-old child near a river, and the child riding a bike up and down a hill made her realize that when you are young, life appears to stretch on endlessly, like an uphill slope, and milestones take forever to achieve. When you are older, though, it is as if you are cycling downhill: the ride goes faster and faster until it is over. It turns out that this essay, “Aces and Eights,” is the last one in the book, and the section I was looking for takes up but a few paragraphs. Still, it contrasts the outlooks of young and old effectively. She describes the impatience and boredom of youth and then adds: “But momentum propels you over the crest. Imperceptibly, you start down. When do the days start to blur and then, breaking your heart, the seasons?” This is what I read Annie Dillard to discover: the transition from the simple to the sublime.

I did not only read the final essay, though; to warm up to it I read the rest of the book first. Some pieces initiate with walks near her home on an island in Puget Sound, while others take place in remote locations such as the Galapagos Islands and the Arctic and Antarctic. One of the longer essays, “An Expedition to the Pole,” mixes descriptions of attending a Catholic mass and the tragic history of polar exploration. It closes with a comedic dreamlike sequence involving Dillard, famous polar explorers, a bevy of clowns, a priest, and Jesus Christ himself. Most of the essays do not veer this far astray from reality, but several of them involve a connection or comparison between seemingly disparate subjects.

Dillard has a clear, clean writing style that is elegant but easy to follow. Reading her essays is like undertaking a journey that begins in familiar territory but then gets stranger and stranger the farther you get away from home. If you have never read Dillard before, you might want to start with the classic, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. But her other books, including Teaching a Stone to Talk, are well worth reading too, for their cadenced prose and insightful commentary on the natural world, travel, creativity, philosophy, and spirituality.