Going Back to Nature in Living Like Weasels by Annie Dillard

In “Living Like Weasels,” Annie Dillard recounts in detail her attempt to abandon the social constructs and narrow mindset of modern society by venturing into “nature.” She starts by describing the effects modern society has had on the landscape - highways, beer cans, motorcycle tracks. To Dillard, this is clearly not a synergic relationship but a harmful one in which the two can no longer be separated. Even in her remote cottage in the “wilderness,” the remnants of modern living still leave their trace, meaning there is no way to completely live free of modernity, It is from this point that she describes her encounter with a weasel. The rhythm at this point is quite impressive. As she and the weasel lock eyes they are “stunned into stillness". It was the lull before the storm. The reader is engaged and on edge, as Dillard wants them to be because this is where she makes her point clear. The writing becomes much faster in pace as the reader is quickly swept into a frenzy of Dillard’s rushing thoughts.

She recounts the exchange as emotionally and psychologically exhausting and painful, describing the encounter as a “blow or. beating of brains [and] gut [that] emptied [their] lungs”. This moment symbolizes the encounter between the products of modern society and nature which seems to be one that is simultaneously intimate and violent. Dillard makes particular mention of the fact that the weasels eyes were analogous to a window, noting their transparency Transparency and intimacy are interrelated concepts. Transparency is a way to relate to another while revealing your inner self which implies a sense of vulnerability. The eyes are the window of the soul and the weasel looks straight into Dillard‘s eyes to look for her intentions, Her claim that her intent is to learn to be mindless is clearly demonstrated to be not so much the truth through her encounters with the wild.

Dillard is not exactly lying to the reader but it may be better to understand her intent not as to be mindless but to detach herself from emotion and to act upon more primal urges. Her venture into the woods itself is proof of that. Dillard is inquisitive and although she emphasizes that she desires to be unmindful she thinks about absolutely everything that she sees. To Dillard the weasel is representative of the ideal of nature - an exemplar on proper living, which any individual might better themselves by imitating. The weasel is “open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing”. Dillard gains momentum as she describes how “the world [becomes] dismantled“ after she and the weasel lock eyes, and how “lf [we] looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t. We keep our skulls”. Despite her admiration for the weasel‘s carefree way of life, she recognizes the impenetrable barrier between the human and the natural worlds and that divergence from one or convergence of the two is a near impossibility.

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This is why she presents the human-nature dichotomy to her readers to make us aware of the qualities that she distills from the weasel as admirable. This dichotomy is also the reason for why the meeting of the nature and the human became violent. Dillard artfully crafts her perspective for the reader and although she may seem quite eccentric it is easy to see and to understand how living in bare necessity is not only admirable but desirable Dillard‘s eccentricity initially catches the reader off guard and can cause a lack of understanding but I have come to realize that with her unconventionality comes her thoughts, all of her thoughts unfiltered. She does her best not to guide the reader through her thought process or to just simply tell the reader what they are supposed to think but instead allows the reader to come to her understanding organically.

Perspective is not something that comes from an outline or a “how-to“ pamphlet but comes from experience and it is through her extremely and seemingly overly detailed account of her encounter that the reader does so. I like to compare this to my experience interacting in this urban concrete jungle that I am living in - Manhattan. When I initially decided that I was going to be attending New York University various people in my life told me what my experiences were going to be like In a city so densely populated I was going to have many impersonal encounters with people but close relationships would be few and far between.

I was also told of the great diversity of people that the city holds which was very different from the cookie-cutter suburbia that I come from where it seems that every house you pass on the street is just of slight variation from the next I have found much of what I had been told to be not so much the truth, I have come across some of the most interesting and fascinating people that I have ever met in my life and what I find to be most interesting is everyone’s different perspectives. It is because of these interactions that I truly wanted to interact with this new environment. I started doing something truly unconventional that become a borrowed habit from someone whom I had met in my first few weeks of being here.

I decided that I was going to do the majority of my reading while riding the subway. I would get on the 4 5 6 line or the just outside of my Union Square residence and take it uptown to Queens or downtown to Brooklyn until the very last stop What I noticed that was absolutely remarkable to me was the clear and drastic change of the population of subway riders as I went to each and every stop. In a city that is said to be so diverse, this population of people who would get on and off and certain stops were pretty homogenous and to me, that was very telling.

It seems that Manhattan is so integrated and mixed culturally and ethnically but to be quite honest when it comes to where certain populations of people live and go it’s not so much the truth. The city is still very much divided and it is from these experiences that I learned I wanted to explore each and every micro-community within this seemingly infinite larger community Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels" truly speaks more plainly about herself than this magical encounter with a weasel. It is through all of these qualities that Dillard mentions - humanity and nature, civilization and wilderness, etc. That the reader truly comes to an understanding of what Dillard is talking about - the importance of locking eyes with the “wild” of your environment.

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