"As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net"
About this Quote
The ambition here is almost embarrassingly grand: to live as if forgetting were a moral failure. Dillard frames memory as a "life's work", not a talent, turning attention into craft and discipline. That dash - "everything - everything" - reads like a tightening fist. It is insistence bordering on desperation, the kind you feel when you realize how quickly experience evaporates even while you're in it.
The plankton net is the masterstroke. It's a humble, scientific tool meant to catch what the naked eye misses: tiny, drifting organisms that make up whole ecosystems. Dillard isn't chasing the headline moments; she's after the particulate matter of living, the near-invisible details that give days their texture. The image also smuggles in an admission of futility. A net doesn't preserve plankton; it snags it briefly, often damaging what it collects. So "against loss" isn't triumphalist. It's a stance. You fight knowing you'll lose, because the alternative is letting the world slip through you unchallenged.
Context matters: Dillard's work sits in the tradition of American nature writing and spiritual autobiography, but with a modern, restless edge. She treats perception as both ecstasy and burden. The subtext is anxiety about time - not just mortality, but the smaller deaths of distraction, speed, and inattention. Memory becomes an ethical practice: a refusal to let the ordinary be annihilated by oblivion.
The plankton net is the masterstroke. It's a humble, scientific tool meant to catch what the naked eye misses: tiny, drifting organisms that make up whole ecosystems. Dillard isn't chasing the headline moments; she's after the particulate matter of living, the near-invisible details that give days their texture. The image also smuggles in an admission of futility. A net doesn't preserve plankton; it snags it briefly, often damaging what it collects. So "against loss" isn't triumphalist. It's a stance. You fight knowing you'll lose, because the alternative is letting the world slip through you unchallenged.
Context matters: Dillard's work sits in the tradition of American nature writing and spiritual autobiography, but with a modern, restless edge. She treats perception as both ecstasy and burden. The subtext is anxiety about time - not just mortality, but the smaller deaths of distraction, speed, and inattention. Memory becomes an ethical practice: a refusal to let the ordinary be annihilated by oblivion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Legacy & Remembrance |
|---|
More Quotes by Annie
Add to List
