Annie Dillard and The Editor’s Life
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Executive Editor, Alexandra Barylski on how Annie Dillard and a 2017 Marginalia essay changed her life
What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are they not both saying: Hello? - Annie Dillard (1945 - 2026)
We are here to witness and to wonder. Annie Dillard knew this.
Her writing is a testimony to awe, to the astonishment we ought rightly to feel before the magnitude and power of life itself. Figures like Charles Darwin, the Baal Shem Tov, Teilhard de Chardin, and Werner Heisenberg appear side-by-side in her pages. Philosophy, science, and spirituality are for Annie Dillard the lenses we stack together to bring existence into focus. As a writer, she has only one subject, one belief. It is the theme of every book, essay, and poem: Life.
When I think of Annie Dillard, my mind skips like a stone across Galapagos iguanas and weasels, Martin Buber and Meister Eckhart, a solar eclipse and comets. What is wonderful, dire, absurd, scientific, mystical, heartbreaking, senseless, and sublime touch shoulders everywhere in her work, as if to say, What are all these boundaries and borders but an illusion? Authorities and experts across many fields are present throughout her books, but she is always putting them in conversation at the feast-table of her writing life. All of her particulars, which some critics have deemed “quirky facts,” are in service of the whole.
A highly celebrated author, Annie Dillard is best known for her 1975 Pulitzer Prize winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She was awarded grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and her contributions to literature culminated in 2014 when President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal at the White House.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is how I met Annie Dillard when I was eighteen. My college roommate was assigned it in her high school senior English class, much to her personal torture. As we got to know each other that first week of college, she was sure that I would love it. (Her gifted paperback remains my copy.) I finished the book and immediately checked out Dillard’s other works from the library. I fell in love with her sense that life is holistic and that meaning is not only possible, it is our high calling to care deeply for this “splintered wreck” of a world. We have not been placed into an ideal; it is our human task to make it thus. We are here to make sense of what, so often, feels divided and meaningless. A Hegelian in spirit, her work testifies that we are here to “think the whole.”
That unifying energy is what attracted me to Marginalia in 2017. I was standing at a small but sunny kitchen counter browsing on my laptop when I clicked on Editor-in-Chief Samuel Loncar’s inaugural essay, “Beyond Borders: A Vision for Freedom and Depth in the Digital Age.”
In the essay, Loncar laid out his vision for Marginalia Review of Books, for a “renewed vision of science and the humanities on a platform that integrates the best insights of academia with lucid discussion of their broader relevance.” A philosopher and scholar, he explained that the research university and the internet—the two greatest knowledge technologies of the modern world—have inadvertently fueled social fragmentation and political tribalism. The inaugural essay outlined Loncar’s plan to combine the merits of each technology in a new way, thus resolving the downside of both.
As an educator with big ideals working for years in a broken system, Loncar’s vision of “pragmatic utopianism” attracted me right away. He explained how he was building a bridge to span the divide between academic expertise, journalism, and the public sphere through a pay-wall-free digital commons: Marginalia Review of Books. This space would help “transcend regional disputes—whether of disciplines or nations,” and it would help keep essential arguments going “in a time when the suppression of debate and ideas represents the greatest threat to global freedom.”
For a young woman with yet unrealized dreams of living up to her idols, Margaret Fuller, Sylvia Beach, and Maxwell Perkins, Loncar’s vision presented the kind of opportunity that knocks once in a lifetime. So I answered. I sent him an email. He replied. I volunteered for several years as an editor. Nine years later, I’m writing the inaugural essay for Marginalia’s 2026 - 2027 publishing year. The entire course of my life changed one February morning in 2017 because I read a freely available essay shared to Facebook.
Life, Annie Dillard knew, is far more strange and far more exciting than we permit ourselves to experience or imagine. I believed her at eighteen, but it was only in the past nine years that theory became practice.
“You do not have to sit outside in the dark,” Dillard says in her essay “An Expedition to the Pole,” but if “you want to look at the stars, you will find darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.” You do not have to bear witness to your life, or to life at all. You can ignore life. You are not required to wonder about what life is. If, however, you want to know something about what it means to exist as a human being, or to experience meaning in the thing you call your life, you will find curiosity about the nature of being alive necessary.
In a historical moment where everyday headlines are reminders that AI might destroy humanity and the earth, more people are curious about what it means to be human, to be alive. Suddenly, it seems like everyone wants to know if our biological life, if all biological life, is actually mechanical.
The mechanistic model of life, created by Rene Descartes, says yes, biological life is like a machine. This view is what most of us have been taught in school. But advances in biological research at the level of molecular and cell biology suggest that this model is outdated. Biological life is far more complex than we previously thought.
“What stories should we tell about all this complexity?” says Philip Ball, author of How Life Works: A Users Guide to the New Biology and Research Director for our Meanings of Life: The New Biology Project, funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. The project is a direct response to these discoveries, and it seeks to create a new narrative for the field of biology at a time when conscious, AI, biological life, and agency are on almost everyone’s mind and social media feeds.
Recently, I’ve seen several clips from Harold Bloom’s lecture on Hamlet where he argues that Hamlet’s character exhibits a struggle for autonomy, contending with Shakespeare himself. The full lecture is about the complex relationship between the character and his creator, which manifests, according to Bloom, in Hamlet’s consciousness being at war with itself.
In his forthcoming essay “Johnathan Franzen and Dostoevsky: The Freedom of the Will as a Product of Style,” Marginalia’s Assistant Editor for Culture, Sam Liu takes on the question of whether or not fictional characters break away from their authors, which is in essence a debate about free will, artistic creation, and divine inspiration. According to Franzen, the characters are in his control, fated to his given conditions. But in Dostoevsky, Liu writes, the “battle between character and author” is everywhere evident. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Dostoevsky’s characters struggle against him.
Tensions around fate and freedom are not new to our time; they also animate the Enlightenment philosophical tradition. In his forthcoming review of G. Anthony Bruno’s Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant, Richard Polt shows how 18th to 20th century debates in German philosophy are highly relevant to current discussions of meaning and agency. Facticity says that there are a set of concrete, unalterable conditions and givens that constrain and shape human existence; these must be accepted as facts. “For Fichte, facticity is intolerable,” writes Polt, and his “project embodies the spirit of autonomy and the craving for certainty that have driven much of philosophy from its inception, but that especially characterize the Enlightenment and thinkers such as Kant.”
I don’t recall Annie Dillard quoting Fichte, but she certainly believed that we are not inescapably situated beings. Humans arrive in time, a body, a culture, a religion, a state, and it is true that these conditions shape us, but they do not totally determine us. It is we who choose to lock ourselves into the boundaries and binaries.
A forthcoming interview with political theorist and theologian, Luke Bretherton, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford and Marginalia’s Editor-in-Chief, Samuel Loncar explores where the categories of politics and religion break down. Their conversation focuses on Bretherton’s book, What Is Political Theology? (Columbia University Press), co-authored with Vincent W. Lloyd, and Valentina Napolitano.
Political theology is interested in how religious beliefs, symbols, and institutions shape political ideas and public life, and how political power can take on religious-like forms. Our lives are bound up in these modern categories, and we need both to understand our current condition. In the interview, Bretherton and Loncar explore a radical humanism that integrates the contexts in which all our problems are enmeshed, and they affirm the importance of fundamental science and the wisdom of religious communities in political life. Our global concerns demand the best from both of these worlds to democratically protect human life.
“Life,” says biologist and Nobel laureate Paul Nurse in his interview for our New Biology Project, “is organized in space and time. . .life is something that is able to self-assemble into a whole, behaving object. And that’s what a cell is, too. . . A cell can organize itself in space and time. It has purpose, the purpose of the whole—to grow, reproduce, maintain itself. All the things that you or I would do, but in a much simpler state.” What is it like to be here, that is to say, to exist in space in time?
Poet and philosopher John O’Donohue provides an answer in the opening line to his wonderful book, Anam Cara: “It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you.” When I think of what unites the best scientists and artists, the ones whose discoveries and creations define our history, I think of their reverence for mystery and the delight in pursuing understanding for the sake of understanding, not for the sake of power to dominate and control.
Annie Dillard’s essays, fiction, and poetry are about what it is like for us humans to be here, to be alive, and therefore her work is a perpetual expression of reverence. In his essay, “After the Genetic Paradigm: Why We Need a New Biology,” Ball explains why biology needs a new narrative and shares his hope that it “can help restore a sense of awe and reverence” for how life works. There is no division in life. Whether one is a poet or scientist, the subject of life itself brings greater awareness to the magnificence of being here.
“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 that we may feel again their majesty and power?” asks Annie Dillard in The Writing Life.
Illumination, inspiration, the possibility of meaning, and the majesty of the human experience do not know party lines. We live fully when we embrace the mysteries present in biology, physics, mathematics, theology, history, literature, and philosophy. When I think of Marginalia, I think of our editors, writers, and readers who come from all backgrounds and beliefs, whose specialized silos of learning contribute to the whole of knowledge that we create and curate for the purpose of human flourishing. When I think of Marginalia, I see how it is through our differences that we find wholeness in the human experience.
Annie Dillard knew this. Her love was for the universal, for the diverse marvel of life itself. She helped me see what it looks like to ceaselessly wonder the whole. Inspired by Emerson, she rolled up her sleeves and set herself about “obeying the Almighty effort,” which is to make an advance “on Chaos and the Dark.” She was not ashamed of the magnitude contained in us all. She did not cower at the surpassing beauty and power of the human, and therefore she believed in the possibility of meaning, courage, and wisdom in an imperfect world. I do, too.
Alexandra Barylski, M.A. (Yale University) is the Executive Editor of Marginalia Review of Books, where she is also the Director of Publications and PRograms at the Institute for the Meanings of Science. She is the founder of The Writing College and The Poetry Peddler. Her second collection of poetry is Necessities of Mending.
