October 9, 2026

 

 

 

 

from The Writing Life

by Annie Dillard

 

 

 

“People who read are not too lazy to flip on the television; they prefer books.”

—Annie Dillard

 

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is not about Tinker Creek. It is about the pilgrimage. Annie Dillard taught me—and many others I know—that writing over a lifetime takes the essayist on a spiritual journey through the physical world. To mark her recent death we will reprise our feature on her from November 8, 2025. In it she defends the book and readers of the book in a way that seems appropriate today when the death of reading literature seems to some like a possibility.

 

Dillard had great faith in readers, and when I get blue about the fate of books I turn to the pages in her collection The Writing Life that contain the two paragraphs below. In them she cedes ground to visual media such as television and movies, but claims a unique status for books. Over the next few weeks THE will take a look at the promise of AI for, and the threat of it to, serious writers and readers, so Dillard's thoughts on the fate of books before that cybernetic beast emerged in our lives seems like a good place to begin our enquiry. She starts with movies, and ends with what might be the book's last defense: literature.

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Two Paragraphs for the Week

 

That is the movies. That is their ground. The printed word cannot compete with the movies on their ground, and should not. You can describe beautiful faces, car chases, or valleys full of Indians on horseback until you run out of words, and you will not approach the movies’ spectacle. Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor. I cannot name what, in the text, alerts the reader to suspect the writer of mixed motives; I cannot specify which sen­tences, in several books, have caused me to read on with increasing dismay, and finally close the books because I smelled a rat. Such books seem uneasy being books; they seem eager to fling off their dis­guises and jump onto screens.

 

Why would anyone read a book instead of watch­ing big people move on a screen? Because a book can be literature. It is a subtle thing—a poor thing, but our own. In my view, the more literary the book—the more purely verbal, crafted sentence by sentence, the more imaginative, reasoned, and deep—the more likely people are to read it. The people who read are the people who like literature, after all, whatever that might be. They like, or re­quire, what books alone have. If they want to see films that evening, they will find films. If they do not like to read, they will not. People who read are not too lazy to flip on the television; they prefer books. I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.

 

—Annie Dillard​​​