"Living Like Weasels"

I'm working through the St. John's reading list – right now Aristotle's Politics is on my nightstand – and also great fiction books I want to know – currently Anna Karenina. But one should have some whimsy in reading too, yes? My “fun” read this week is Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard. Dillard is one of my literary heroes, now for her nonfiction work as well as her fiction. Let me show you why.

A favorite essay of mine is "Living Like Weasels". In it, Dillard describes the way a weasel goes in for the kill – it sinks its teeth in the underside of the neck and doesn't let go till its prey is dead. She describes an eagle who was found with “the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat.” Apparently in their struggle, the weasel did not win, but neither did it let go. It held on till it was “beautiful airborne bones.”

Dillard goes on to tell of a weasel she met suddenly by a pond one day. They lost themselves in the shock of seeing each other, a moment of realness between them after which the weasel whisked beneath a wild rose bush. She speaks of how she would like to live like a weasel, who even when killing doesn't “attack”, but rather surrenders to its necessity. She says, “What does a weasel think about? He won't say. His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose-leaf, and blown.”

Beyond how much I adore the substance of what she's written in this essay, I admire Dillard's flawless development of ideas, the exposition that feels like a benevolent chokehold, how the whole thing is one careful, headlong, unselfconscious metaphor, one in which the word “like” is never used.

“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part.”

Surrender, full-steam ahead.