Old Sentences: From Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels”
The sentence is ten words long. It contains two punctuation marks, and ends with a full stop. It appears in the essay "Living Like Weasels" in Teaching a Stone to Talk, written by Annie Dillard. The text that I own was published by Perennial Library in 1988.
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
This short sentence is the opening of one of the essay's longer paragraphs, one of the meatier paragraphs. It's one of those sentences that eases the reader into a paragraph, nice and easy to read, short and to the point. Despite it's brevity, it contains multitudes.
The two-word interjection in the sentence -- "or remember" -- brings a dimensionality to the sentence that expands outward along the lines of the entire essay. At its heart, the essay does not deign to instruct us in how to find the thing we want to live for. Instead, it simply instructs us, that once we've found that thing, grab onto it and don't let go, as the weasel grabs onto prey and doesn't let go for anything, even to save its own life.
That interjection suggests the possibility that we all knew how to live like this, at some point in the murky past. Long ago. But we've since forgotten, most of us, and need to be open to being either reminded or learned by the natural world in how we do it.
With this simple declaration, "I would like to...," the author opens herself up to that which the natural world might teach her. It's such a simple and direct line of thought, one we have all the time, yet one that, in most modern environments we find ourselves in, we're discouraged from voicing. In the face of so many screens vying for our attention, it seems almost an act of rebellion to say, "I would like to do this thing," -- a thing which has not been recommended by the algorithm, an activity which does not produce data for harvesting, perhaps even something altogether unproductive. A simple but profound expression of want, desire, need, that, should we clamp down on it with the abandon of a hungry weasel, can carry us into territory all our own.
Dillard suggests that we look to nature, and instinctual living guided by necessity, for a way to live. She keeps her focus narrow in this short essay, and does not suggest how to find your calling in life. But she does suggest a clue as to how to live once you've found it: clamped onto the soft spot, like the weasel's jaws around the neck, unyielding and allowing it to carry it where it would.
