Annie Dillard on God, Earth, and Freedom

Annie Dillard was awarded the 1975 Pultizer Prize for General Nonfiction for Pilgrim at TInker Creek. Here’s a passage from that astonishing classic, laid out as a poem for your reading pleasure.

Why so many forms?
Why not just that one
hydrogen atom?

The creator goes off
on one wild, specific
tangent after another,
or millions simultaneously,
with an exuberance
that would seem to be
unwarranted, and with
an abandoned energy sprung
from an unfathomable font.

What is going on here?
The point of the dragonfly’s
terrible lip, the giant water bug,
birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle
and flash of sunlighted minnows,
is not that it all fits together
like clockwork – for it doesn’t,
particularly, not even inside
the goldfish bowl – but that
it all flows so freely and wild,
like the creek, that it all surges
in such a free, fringed tangle.

Freedom is the world’s water
and weather, the world’s nourishment
freely given, its soil and sap:
and the creator loves pizzazz.

+ Annie Dillard