![]() ![]() This is life seen, as Dillard writes in For the Time Being, “from the aspect of eternity.” Prepositions do a great deal of work: she places the earthly before the cosmic her characters look at the stars a wider life, and a wider time, live in her imagined beings. A wider life breathed in him, and things’ rims stirred and reared back.” Dillard’s is a poetics, even a metaphysics, of relationality and juxtaposition. In one typical scene, a character “stood on the foredune’s lip and looked at the stars over the ocean. In it, characters’ lives “play… out before the backdrop of fixed stars” their human-sized concerns-about love, poetry, the inevitable late-summer fade of the Boston Red Sox-are set against the time-scale of planets and galaxies. “Cosmic realism” is a perfect description of Dillard’s slim novel. If there were such a thing as cosmic realism, The Maytrees would be a classic of the genre. ![]() Its sea is wild and generative, its sky orders the constellations, and both are primordial, archaic, full of the fact of time past and persisting, unchanging, changing everything. And time in its mystery and grandeur bestrides this novel. In a 2007 review of Annie Dillard’s novel The Maytrees, Marilynne Robinson marveled at the temporal expansiveness of Dillard’s imaginative vision:ĭillard has always been fascinated by time-by the fact that existence is charged with it, saturated with it, borne along by it into a future that makes the span of any life less than negligible. ![]()
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