What a Weasel Knows That We Forget: Annie Dillard on How to Live

Suppose we answer the most important question of existence in the affirmative. There is then only one question remaining: How shall we live this life? Despite all the technologies of thought and feeling we have invented to divine an answer — philosophy and poetry, scripture and self-help — life stares mutely back at us, immense and indifferent, having abled us with opposable thumbs and handicapped us with a consciousness capable of self-reference that renders us dissatisfied with the banality of mere survival. Beneath the overstory of one hundred trillion synapses, the overthinking animal keeps losing its way in the wilderness… read article