Polly

‘There was this funny thing that anything could happen now that we realized everything had.'

‘We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.'

One can count on Annie Dillard for Spiritual/metaphysical recalibration and a heavy dose of stepping back and seeing reality for what it is, or isn't—'reality checks' abound in her work.

‘How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.
What can any artist set on fire but his world?'

This was my second reading of this petite poetic novella. I am positive I'll be reading it again someday.

This collection is full of delightful gems. Some could be considered poems rather than stories, others microfiction. A few favourites are:
Revenge Of The Lawn
1/3, 1/3, 1/3
Pacific Fire Radio
Coffee
Lint

___________

LINT

I'm haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabularies and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.
I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning.
They are things that just happened like lint.

DNF
It's not “bad,” exactly, but for me, this book is agonizingly boring. The pacing is off, and the narration/perspective is awkward. Maybe it's a wrong-place-wrong-time kind of thing. Who knows.

Reading Eagleman's forty vignette-style tales, imaginings of what the afterlife could be like, I felt claustrophobic and bored. Much of the time he seemed to be trapped in the conventional ideas of a male God or gods as clumsy, aloof creators (only twice were they a female), traditional love between men and women as the centre of human connection, and the overused, stale concept of heaven and Hell. He also has a bad habit of anthropomorphizing everything from human cells to a solitary particle that created then un-created the entire universe. It felt juvenile and mostly silly, but not in a funny or clever way. I'm curious to read his nonfiction work in neuroscience. Maybe he shines a little brighter in this genre.
I like the concept of this book, which I thought had a lot of potential, but his execution was a chore to get through.