Kevin Desabelle
AFTER lunch, feeling a bit literary in the gloomy weather,
I googled “annie dillard, coffee” and came upon a review
of Dillard’s The Writing Life by Bobby Matherne,
who echoes Annie’s comparison of writing to sculpting
and mentions Auguste Rodin – considered, in Wikipedia,
a progenitor of modern sculpture,
who in the fulfillment of his artistic duties had an affair
with his student Camille, herself a talented sculptor
(who sadly becomes mentally ill in later life)
and the sister of Paul Claudel, a poet and dramatist
notable as an anomaly in the coffee-drinking literati of his time
because of being a right-leaning Catholic.
It’s kind of reassuring, I thought, how you can’t extricate
from the world of search engines the world of unflatteringly
human humans – skill, sanity, salvation and all –
the same way you probably will never be able to separate
the bliss of reading and the image of curling up to a book
and a warm cup by the window on a rainy afternoon.