Reviews for Human evolution

The average rating for Human evolution based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-09-14 00:00:00 Max Bart This is a brief yet intense essay on the art, or as Dillard would say, the burden of writing that will delight readers and aspiring writers alike. Writing is a way of life, and Dillard’s relationship with words is, to say the least, controversial. Her lucid ponderings on the obsessive nature of those who devote their lives to squeeze the world out into sentences, limited by expression and linguistic patterns, are as petrifying as they are eye-opening. Far from the romantic idea of a genius struck by sudden inspiration, incessantly scribbling away in otherworldly vision and transforming it into polished and clearly defined paragraphs, Dillard describes the endless struggle the writer has to undergo to put down a handful of fragmented sentences per day. The mundane is the worst enemy: constant battles against distraction, physical needs, the vertigo of a blank page or the looming weight of others’ expectations; and more philosophical dilemmas on the impossibility to capture the untainted beauty of the world of ideas into the prison of form and restrictive words, set the orbit to Dillard’s limitless universe. And yet. And yet. Dillard uses the pen as a magician would use his wand and puts the reader under the irresistible spell of her spiritual writing. Her personal anecdotes and exquisite meditations on the implications of building one’s life around literature reminded me of great masters such as Thoreau, Julian Barnes and Rebecca Solnit, who blend autobiography with prose poetry of the finest quality. Beauty and eloquence need not be at odds; if you think they are, please pick this short essay and be proven wrong by Dillard’s magic. Fireworks for the blind. “I lived on the beach with one foot in fatal salt water and one foot on a billion of grains of sand. The brink of the infinite there was too like writing’s solitude. Each sentence hung over an abyssal ocean or sky which held all possibilities, as well as the possibility of nothing.”

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-05 00:00:00 Luca Corvi In this short collection of essays on craft, Dillard meditates on what it means to become a writer as well as why someone might want to write in the first place: her seven essays, read in sequence, frame the writing life as a quasi-religious vocation that demands both hard work and curiosity, daring and endurance, from those drawn to it. Dillard’s language is clear, her transitions smooth, her pacing swift. Her prose flows calmly from one point to the next, and her attention to detail makes the essays stimulating to read. Throughout the collection, Dillard revives the Romantic concept of the writer as a solitary figure removed from the spheres of society and commerce, and she attributes to writing a kind of spiritual fervor that ties the act to the sublime, which the essayist often codifies here as “the infinite.” Far from associating good writing with spontaneity, though, Dillard also stresses how much labor is involved in completing even a single work of writing, and she insists that writers not be interested in fame. All this makes for a curious argument that mystifies the writing life, elevating it above other kinds of work, without idolizing the writer as celebrity.