Loving the Tree of Life: Annie Dillard on How to Bear Your Mortality

“We live and move by splitting the light of the present, as a canoe’s bow parts water.”

“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” wrote Walt Whitman a century and a half before Richard Dawkins considered the luckiness of death as a radiant token of the improbable odds of having lived at all. Death — the harrowing fact of our mortality — is the central animating force of life, the one great terror for which we have devised the coping mechanisms of love and art. Everything we...