SubscribeSeptember 18th, 2009
Bass and Dillard: truth in fiction
I’ve been thinking about a story by Rick Bass called “The Myths of Bears” (published in The Sky The Stars The Wilderness). Reading it brought Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to mind. Not because they are both about nature, but really because only one is really about the world. I liked Pilgrim but it isn’t really about this earth. It’s about being a Christian pilgrim wanting to transcend the world, or at least to reach that reality where the cyclic nature of our reality is gone, frozen in a space where it can be seen, appreciated perhaps, but not enjoined.
“The Myths of Bears” is in that sense its opposite. It is a harshly beautiful story that never even contemplates trying to escape the round that is life and death, beauty and ugliness. Rather it shows them as one thing, that death-life and beauty-ugliness are what the world, for us, is.
Read the rest of this entry »