Why I Love the Internet

In a word: "discovery." Never a day passes when I'm on the internet that I don't find something compelling to read, ponder and sort out for myself. Today's discovery still has me smiling.

Until a tab here and a click there, I knew not that Annie Dillard of "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" fame and Eudora Welty of "The Petrified Man" fame had even the remotest connection. Thanks to a 1999 article by David Bowman, discovered at salon.com today, I fancy I have new and amusing insights into both ladies.

Understand, I'm a big fan of both writers. Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," which I marveled at in the mid-1970's, ranks near the top of my nonfiction favorites. "The Ponder Heart" and other Welty tales keep me in touch with my Mississippi self. So how do the ladies interconnect? Writing for "Brilliant Careers" at salon.com, David Bowman puts it this way (paraphrasing):

Eudora once wrote a piece in the NY Times commenting on Annie Dillard's prose. Voluntary or solicited--David doesn't say--Eudora confessed that she had no idea what Annie was talking about when she wrote such as this: "You cannot have mountains and creeks without space. And space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death."

"Dillard's personifications baffled poor Eudora," wrote David. He then quoted this line from Eudora sugesting she sympathized with Dillard nonetheless: "A reader's heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled." My take? Polite Southern female's way of saying, "Damn! This bitch is crazy!" But Eudora was Far Too Gentle for such words to escape. It is we card-carrying, 21st century, practiced Southern females who prefer the uncoded language yet easily resort to coded cooing when necessary.

So here's the bottom line:

Having recently toured Eudora's home, gardens, bookshelves, and more of her writings, AND having eagerly revisited Dillard and her biography on the internet today, I'm amused at the distance between the genteel, perceptive Welty and the imaginative, creative, self-described "insane" Annie Dillard. Theirs is the distance between Earth (Welty) and Sky (Dillard). Both women contemplated both realms, for sure, but one was decidedly more earthbound and the other decidedly more metaphysical. Without the internet, I doubt I would've discovered such amazing, amusing mileage between this pair of prized women writers.