Annie Dillard Living Like Weasels

All good things must come to an end. A common phrase we have become accustomed to hearing, and a phrase that parallels the meaning of Annie Dillard’s “The Chase”, an excerpt from her autobiography “An American Childhood.” In “The Chase” (1987), Annie Dillard recounts how childhood, no matter how enjoyable, will come to a close. Dillard conveys this by carefully detailing her childhood experience as a tomboy and that “nothing girls did could not compare” (1). Her experience during “the chase” symbolized an end of Dillard's childhood and wishing for “the glory to last forever” (19). The author recounts her story of “the chase” in order to express exuberance and love for childhood compared to the fact of mandatory growing old. The author addresses the audience in this narrative chapter of “An American Childhood” to express how short childhood is is this passing craze of life. The author uses expertly composed imagery, parallelism, diction and tone to create the impactful story in a chapter of her autobiography.

In "Living like Weasels", author Annie Dillard uses rhetorical devices to convey that life would be better lived solely in a physical capacity, governed by "necessity", executed by instinct. Through Dillard's use of descriptive imagery, indulging her audience, radical comparisons of nature and civilization and anecdotal evidence, this concept is ultimately conveyed.

Annie Dillard’s essay “Living Like Weasels” exhibits the mindless, unbiased, and instinctive ways she proposes humans should live by observing a weasel at a nearby pond close to her home. Dillard encounters about a sixty second gaze with a weasel she seems to entirely connect with. In turn, this preludes a rapid sequence of questions and propositions about “living as we should”. Unfortunately, we tend to consume our self with our surroundings and distractions in life, which is not a problem until we are blatantly told. How have we strayed so far from our once instinctive lifestyle?

Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels” details Dillard’s encounter with a weasel in the wild, and her attempts to come to terms with her feelings about said meeting. Dillard not only goes into great detail about the experience itself, but she also provides a very good background on weasels, as well as others’ experiences with the animal. Through her use of background analysis on weasels, as well as with her own experience, Dillard uses the three rhetorical appeals to argue why we humans could and should “live like weasels”.

In her essay “Living Like Weasels”, Annie Dillard explores the idea of following a single calling in life, and attaching one’s self it this calling as the weasel on Ernest Thompson Seton’s eagle had. Dillard presents her argument using the analogy of a weasel and how the; “weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity” (Dillard). In constructing her argument, however, she often contradicts herself undermining the effectiveness of her argument and leaving the reader confused. Dillard primarily uses ethos and pathos to support her argument and concerning both, the reader discovers; inconsistencies in her character, and conflicts between her perceptions of the weasel’s emotions and its actions. Concerning her ethos, Dillard presents herself as a part of suburbia and then is suddenly, inexplicably overcome by the desire to live wild. Dillard also uses very detailed language throughout the essay in describing her surroundings and thoughts, however; this further undermines her argument and ethos as she is trying to convince the reader that she could simply become as simple and single minded as the weasel she has focused her argument around. With her use of pathos, Dillard begins her essay with descriptions of the weasel’s brutality, yet; she concludes by stating the weasel lives as is necessary. By simplifying her experience and presenting a reasonable explanation for why she wanted to

1) According to Dillard, lovers and the knowledgeable can see well. Yet she also suggests that those who are knowledgeable on a topic, such as people who have been blind from birth and can suddenly see (due to an opperation), can perhaps view more objectively the world around them, and see it in a way that those with vision from birth cannot. Infants, she says, can see very clearly, for they are viewing the world for the first time, and can observe the colors and the light with no prejudgments, but we forget this experience as we grow older, and only occasionally catch glimpses of this phenomenon.

Everyone knows what writing is to one extent or another, but we all have different definitions of how it should be done and varying degrees of seriousness about the art. We all have a process of writing, but each is unique to ourselves and our own experiences. Annie Dillard and Stephen King are two well known authors who have published many pieces, two of which describe how they view the writing process and let their readers get a peek of what goes on through their minds when they write. These two pieces are Dillard’s The Writing Life and King’s “What Writing Is.”

In “Living Like Weasels,” author Annie Dillard’s idea is that humans can benefit from living wild as a weasel. I strongly agree because to live wild like a weasel is to live mindless, free and focused. With these living abilities we as humans will be able get closer to our aspirations in life and do whatever means necessary to get there.

This essay was originally written in February of 1996 for a composition class that I took at a local community college while completing my third and final year of high school. The original text has been edited to correct spelling and grammar. In truth, this essay is more of a collaboration between Betsy and I. She had take the class from the same instructor the year before. Many of the concepts discussed are largely extrapolations and enhancements of ideas she expressed. She got a B+ on her version; I got an A on mine :).

Richard Harding Davis presents many short stories based on romance and war. His biographical information will share that he experiences time in the war and when he writes he gives vivid description; Therefore, you can actually picture what is going on. In one particular story, a woman loved this man so deeply that when he was called to go to war she did not want him to go. Of course, he went to serve his country after she mentioned that he is charmed. With being charmed he would never die because how much she loved him. The reader’s analysis of Davis’s use of literary elements, imagery, and his history are reflected in his short story, “A Charmed Life”.

“We were a clan of doctors and lawyers and teachers, with the odd nurse, poet, or judge thrown into the mix.” (Kerman, 5). Piper Kerman came from a family that resident from Boston, Massachusetts with no intention of returning home Kerman started her adventure. Graduating from Smith College with a degree in Theater she was already going against the norms for her family. With no set plans after her graduation, the involvement of drug smuggling influenced her life by being incarcerated for the crime. Within the memoir, Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman, symbolism is used through everyday items to represent the awareness of human character and allowing the prisoners to latch onto and allow them to keep some value of their life.

Walt Whitman’s poem When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer shows a moment which captures the beauty of self-reliance and non-conformity. In the poem, the speaker listens to a lecturer who speaks about astronomy through calculations and measurements. Being sick and tired of the lecture, the speaker wanders off outside to see the stars for himself and becomes struck in awe of the physical beauty of the stars. He also regains peace within himself after finding a new outlet for understanding. This idea of non-conformity being a precursor to self-actualization and inner-peace similarly resonates in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. The portrayal Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith are both examples in the novel that show the negative consequences of conformity.

Dillard effectively uses concrete imagery as a way of conveying her inner struggle to the reader in a handful of ways. In the first paragraph, she paints a vivid picture in the reader’s mind by writing “while barred owls called in the forest and pale moths seeking mates

Secondly, Dillard’s work “living like weasels” effectively projects her perspective through the use of her radical comparisons. Throughout the essay, Dillard’s use of comparisons often helped familiarize her audience in connecting complex and abstract concepts together into concrete context. This is first seen as she states “His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose-leaf, and blown.” Through this, Dillard connects a concept most would be familiar with: writing journals, to describe what goes on in a weasel’s mindset. In addition, she illustrates that not only do weasels act out of survival, but simply that their “journal” is a transcript of their physical actions. Dissimilar to humans, weasels do not render their thoughts nor “write in journals”, but rather react out of instinct. It is often seen through the content of the piece that she also enjoys to contrast and compare through the occurrences of juxtaposition. This can be seen in the phrases such as, “Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut”. Through these lines, the ideas of man vs nature are continuously

Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels” provides the reader with insight into a fateful encounter that caused Dillard to delve into how she, and human beings as a whole, decides what she devotes her lifetime to. Dillard compares humanity’s choice to the life of the weasel, an animal that only lives for itself and in the moment rather than the comfortable and planned life of a person. During this story, the reader is given some backstory into how weasels function in their world and how it can be compared to human life.