Unit 2 Writing Practice #3: Reflection on Nature (Dillard) and Travel (Didion).

Unit 2 Writing Practice #3: Reflection on Nature (Dillard) and Travel (Didion). Due [Mar 27] No peer response necessary
Reflection on Nature (Dillard) and Travel (Didion) Writing (roughly 300 words)
Travel Writing and Nature Writing both have long histories that we will not examine. Entire books, courses, and careers have been made of each. The only thing we are doing is thinking about how to use travel and/or nature in the context of a project whose aim is to make a broader commentary about social, political, economic, ecological, and/or cultural realities. Really, the only reason I’m having you read these two short pieces this week is so that you can broaden your horizons about what personal writing can be. It need not deal with the sorts of things that so often occupy our lives: relationships, anxiety, ambition (or in my case, I often feel, the lack thereof), loss. Sometimes personal writing can simply be about how a commitment to observing the world around us can expand our vision, invite us, as Wordsworth so beautifully wrote (https://www(dot)poetryfoundation(dot)org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798), to “see into the life of things.”
Annie Dillard won a Pulitzer Prize for that commitment. To my mind, her book is the most beautiful work of nature writing that we have. In the little excerpt here about frogs, mockingbirds, and sharks she uses her observations of nature to ponder the meaning of survival: “Every live thing,” she says, “is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.” So what, then, is the point? The point is to go on asking the questions, she concludes, to go on observing, fearlessly, relentlessly, purposefully. “We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape,” she urges us, “really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if comes to that, choir the proper praise.” We can’t draw conclusions, in other words, if we aren’t even looking.
Joan Didion is one of the greatest American writers of all time. This essay is from her collection in the book The White Album. Many of the essays in this book involve travel because Didion was an author and a reporter. Like Dillard, Didion is an observer, except her objects are not the natural world, but the constructed world of human community. “Where are we heading” is a refrain throughout the essay—a question she is asked by others, but also seems to be asking of herself. As she travels from Los Angeles to New York to Boston to Chicago and beyond, she is at first “heading” toward a feeling of lightness: “We saw air as our element,” but later she is “heading” toward gravity—the gravity (as in graveness) of life, but also the promise of gravity that is home.
Instructions:
I really don’t care what you say about these two works, but practice craft. Don’t write it once; think about it; revise it; show that you have read carefully and thought about these essays. Use the tools you have learned in this class about focus and development. Use topic sentences, quotation. Have a point. Use roughly the same amount of words I did above (150 each).