Annie Dillard died in September 2026, and Grace Glass wrote her an appreciation in n+1 that refuses the usual eulogy flattery. Dillard published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek at 28, won the Pulitzer, and became the mold for half a century of American personal essays — including, Glass admits, her own. Glass uses Dillard’s own famous weasel — the animal a naturalist had to walk half a mile to water to soak off his hand — as the figure for that influence: “her weasel teeth still scar my writing flexors.”

The essay’s argument is that Dillard was a theologian, not a nature writer, and that her method carried a cost:

  • She repudiated Aristotle and the split between myth and natural philosophy — anything could be likened to everything, in the service of the sentence
  • Her subject was perception, eternity, travel, and the problem of evil; her unit of time was the twinkling, her favorite verb to bollix
  • A mind tuned to microtextures of sensation knows no diachrony, causality, or contradiction — time as an endless succession of unique here-and-nows
  • Glass compares her to Rachel Carson, forty years older and raised before deindustrialization destroyed the lifeworld Carson wrote from; Dillard had to cobble reality back together from mismatched fragments

Then the political bill comes due. Reading Dillard’s travels through Israel, Glass notes her “obtuse refusal to perceive the occupation,” her turn instead to cosmic equivalence — stacking the dead of Tokyo, Hiroshima, the plague, and Burundi into statistical piles. The perspective is beautiful, and useless: “at least the angel of history could identify individuals in the wreckage.”

Glass lands on what survives anyway — “A weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity” — and a grim close: now there is no nature, Tinker Creek runs past a Walmart and a Pepsi plant, and robots do our writing. Her concession is the part worth keeping: after five days straight on the computer, nothing seems more important than learning to notice, really notice, a fern.