The great writers of nature writing are capable men and women, observing nature with a singular acuity and, then, constructing a story that allows the reader to travel to those worlds normally so foreign to our civilized everyday life. Annie Dillard, however, goes further. Annie Dillard sees through the cracks which the natural world is unraveled and rewoven, where the seemingly most disparate phenomena find the link that subjects them to the same law as ineluctable as it is unknowable. Annie Dillard is the daughter of Henry David Thoreau, of course, but also of Master Eckhart. Annie Dillard is a tenacious explorer and this is a book about expeditions to some of the most remote places on Earth (the North Pole, the Galapagos Islands, the Ecuadorian jungle, the Pacific Strait, the Appalachian mountain range...) and to regions of the spirit that very few travelers have reached. Although, ultimately, it does not matter whether Dillard tells us about a trip to the last frontier or a walk through the Blue Ridge hills that surround her house: in this author's prose the natural world, the most exotic, the closest, shines, when it does not burn, as the most lucid metaphor of the spirit. Very few writers have better expressed the inexpressible fear, the unavoidable reverence that nature has always aroused and that our contemporaneity, both in its "effective" and "extractive" version, as well as in its "landscape" and "sustainable" version. Who could accompany Dillard... I can really only think of poets: Emily Dickinson, of course, but also the discreet, yet colossal, Robinson Jeffers. After all, wherever Dillard's gaze rests, the beauty of the world sweeps away her pupils, and her words, like the best poetry, give an account of that struggle to inscribe the ultimate mystery of an emotion that lacks language.
