WHEN YOU WRITE, you lay out a line of words... You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. ¹

I have little experience with writing sentences, but I do have some experience writing mathematical symbols and carefully constructed algorithms. In Annie Dillard's wonder in seeking beauty and mystery by following the path of words, I found parallels for the beauty and mystery that I find in the path of mathematics and algorithms. Few others have ever described this feeling that I have found as an outsider riding along a path of wonder. There is only a faint idea where it is headed and how you may get there. The process is full of wonder and you follow along for the ride.

There is one uncomfortable aspect of the ideas in this book. There seems to be a wonder in following a path wherever it goes, even if it is purposeless. What gives guidance to forks in the road? What about the narrow path? This is the same concern that I had in her essay on Living like Weasels ². On one hand, I love the rare encouragement of finding what you do well and doing it with all of your might. Yet in the midst of it, there comes this notion that we should grab on tight no matter what it may be.

There were a number of impacting sections. Here she is encouraging me to write:

Writing sentences is difficult whatever their subject. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick. ³

Here she perfectly paints the joy that I have seen in reading:

We are reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show. ⁴

Here is a quote expressing the feeling of an idea as a short and momentary flash of lighting:

Einstein likened the generation of a new idea to a chicken's laying an egg: "Kieks--auf einmal ist es da." Cheep--and all at once there it is. ⁵

Here she is admonishing me to not hoard ideas:

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... Something more will arise for later, something better... Anything that you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes. ⁶