"I would like to learn, or remember, how to live"
About this Quote
A simple desire holds humility and urgency: to learn, or remember, how to live. Living appears not as a default setting but as an art, a skill to acquire or a birthright to recover. The doubleness admits uncertainty about the human condition: maybe the knowledge was never taught, or maybe it was once known and then buried under habit, noise, and speed.
Annie Dillard builds her work on the discipline of seeing. At Tinker Creek she walked and watched until the film of familiarity thinned, and the ordinary flared into strangeness. The curriculum is the world itself: water striders skimming a current, a muskrat surfacing and vanishing, the sudden violence of a predator, the lavish waste of seeds and light. To learn how to live is to practice an attention fierce enough to receive both cruelty and beauty without flinching, to let reality unsettle consoling ideas. To remember how to live is to return to the childhood capacity for astonishment, the unguarded wonder that once made a tree blaze with light. Both motions, learning and remembering, train the soul toward presence.
The line also pushes against the cultural scripts that confuse living with producing or accumulating. It suggests an existential apprenticeship rather than a career plan. The tools are patience, receptivity, and moral courage; the measure is whether one remains awake. Writing, for Dillard, is part of the practice: a net for experience, a way to keep the eyes open and the heart consenting to what is.
The phrase keeps its humility. Such knowledge does not arrive once and stay. It must be relearned daily, re-membered in the literal sense of gathering scattered parts of the self. Whether we never knew or have simply forgotten, the task is the same: return to the present with a clear eye, let the world teach, and live as if that teaching mattered.
Annie Dillard builds her work on the discipline of seeing. At Tinker Creek she walked and watched until the film of familiarity thinned, and the ordinary flared into strangeness. The curriculum is the world itself: water striders skimming a current, a muskrat surfacing and vanishing, the sudden violence of a predator, the lavish waste of seeds and light. To learn how to live is to practice an attention fierce enough to receive both cruelty and beauty without flinching, to let reality unsettle consoling ideas. To remember how to live is to return to the childhood capacity for astonishment, the unguarded wonder that once made a tree blaze with light. Both motions, learning and remembering, train the soul toward presence.
The line also pushes against the cultural scripts that confuse living with producing or accumulating. It suggests an existential apprenticeship rather than a career plan. The tools are patience, receptivity, and moral courage; the measure is whether one remains awake. Writing, for Dillard, is part of the practice: a net for experience, a way to keep the eyes open and the heart consenting to what is.
The phrase keeps its humility. Such knowledge does not arrive once and stay. It must be relearned daily, re-membered in the literal sense of gathering scattered parts of the self. Whether we never knew or have simply forgotten, the task is the same: return to the present with a clear eye, let the world teach, and live as if that teaching mattered.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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