Annie Dillard Nature writer

Annie Dillard’s view of nature is simply stated in ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk’: “We are here to witness.” (90) We are not here to analyze, conquer, tame or understand and she does not use any of these themes in her writing like so many other nature writers.

In ‘Very Like a Whale’, Robert Finch is obsessed with the question of why so many people came to observe the whale, and in analyzing this question concludes that they come to confirm their ‘otherness’. In some ways, this does not seem like a nature essay at all, but an essay about human nature, with the whale playing the role of object lesson.

In ‘The Face of a Spider’, David Quammen writes about a very human, moral dilemma, “How should a human behave toward the members of other living species?” (33). This essay seems to be more about humans and less about spiders than the other way around. Again, the theme is “otherness”. Are humans ‘other’ than spiders? Should humans behave ...