The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

by Nina Riggs

Because you are human, and it is your nature to ask for more. Because want, need—those unlit cul-de-sacs—are too perilous unadorned.

Please

how to distill what matters most to each of us in life in order to navigate our way toward the edge of it in a meaningful and satisfying way.

meaningful life

for her, it’s about lucidity: she wants to be able to have a conversation, feel a connection.

for me too!

“It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open.” Dillard enters nature with a giant Emersonian eye—reverent, rhapsodic—almost ecclesiastic. She reminds us again and again to clear our vision of expectations, to try to see without understanding.

seeing

the idea of walking with sacred purpose. The idea of seeking. The ominous landmarks: the Valley of Humiliation, the Doubting Castle.

walk with purpose

“Death everywhere mingles with and is blended into our lives,” Montaigne writes in his forties. “Decline foreshadows its hour and intrudes into our onward course itself. I have portraits of my appearance

Death

faith involves staring into the abyss, seeing that it is dark and full of the unknown—and being okay with that.

faith

the image of smaller flames merging into a larger fire: a metaphor for the creative urge as a conduit for spiritual connection. “A spark of fire is infinitely deep, but a mass of fire reaching from earth upward into heaven, this is the sign of the robust, united, burning, radiant soul,” he wrote in his journal (1842). The spotless orange sunrise on the hills by Walden Pond.

spiritual connection