“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Inasmuch as the sheer beauty of her prose lit me up inside, there was also a profound unease that came along with reading Dillard. She’s an expert at poking an inquisitive finger into some of the charming little delusions I’ve set up for myself, the things that protect me from destabilizing my life.
This was especially true when I made her my subway companion at age 21. She writes of the writing life as monastic and hard and isolated; I was hoping for love and connection and some ease, after finally having escaped from the tyranny of being in high school, my days organized around AP classes and the ringing of a bell. No, Dillard seemed to say, if you want this thing as badly as you say you do, your life needs to be organized around it. “A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.”