Living by Fiction (19 page)
Authors: Annie Dillard
Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann,
Woiwode, Larry,
Wölfli, Adolf,
Woolf, Virginia,
Wurlitzer, Rudolph,
Â
Yeats, William B.,
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Zola, Emile,
   I am most especially and fondly grateful to L. L. Lee, Phyllis Rose, Gary Clevidence, and Rose Moss, who encouraged and challenged me so generously; to Ed Rubacha, Joan Jurale, Susan Magovern, Shirley Henn, and Louis Mink, who helped track sources; to the Ossabaw Foundation and Wesleyan University, which granted me time and space; and to Mary Connie Comfort, who fed the cats.
Annie Dillard is the author of ten other books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
, as well as
An American Childhood, The Living
, and
Mornings Like This
. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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LIVING BY FICTION
. Copyright © 1982 by Annie Dillard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © AUGUST 2007 ISBN: 9780061856532
Version 08092013
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There are no opposing camps; there is no struggle. Each writer is a one-man camp, unallied and unarmed, a lone bivouac under heaven.
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This, clearly, would be a religious, even creationist, reading of the universe. Note how it differs from pantheism. It reads the universe as a significant art object, not as part of a stream of being which includes the observer, and not as personal message. Pantheism is not the only meaningful reading of the natural world. One need not find a spirit in each bush and rock for these things to mean. The bush and rock may be, as it were, literary symbols. But of what? If we could only see the first draft, or locate some letters!
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Incidentally, “Kubla Khan” also raises the question of its own beauty. Why is it so beautiful? Why do otherwise rational peopleâsober, grouchy, skeptical peopleâturn soft in the head about “Kubla Khan”? Why is this creepy-crawly, misty, overlandscaped, striving-after-beautiful-effect, water-colorish little portentous poem one of the most beautiful and powerful poems in English?