A new, unsteady kind of creature lurches forth on the deserted streets of America these days. It is the Walking Driver. You can tell immediately that these beings are not true pedestrians: they waddle, they are unsteady, they have little back-of-the-head vision, they seem unused to the true weight of their bodies. They are not bipeds, nor are they four-legged creatures; they are semi-bipeds, sitting, folded creatures. A Martian observing the lunch hour in one of our cities said to me that an American without a car is gravely ill, like a snail that lost its shell. In fact, an American body is only a "body" when it is inside an automobile. What we see "walking" is only part of the body.

[Language] is like a beam of light on Venus. There, on Venus, heavy atmospheric gravity bends light around the entire circumference of the planet, enabling a man, in theory, to see the back of his own head. Now, the object of every artist's vision is, in one sense, the back of his own head. But the writer, unlike the painter, the sculptor, or composer, cannot form his idea of order directly in his materials; for as soon as he writes the least noun, the whole world starts pouring back onto his page. So fiction, using language like a beam of Venusian light to see the back of his own head xxx to talk about its own art xxx makes a very wide tautological loop. It goes all around the world of language's referents before coming back to its own surface.

Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction

When I was young I thought that all human beings had an organ inside each lower eyelid which caught things that got in the eye. I don't know where I imagined I'd learned this piece of anatomy. Things got in my eye, and then they went away, so I supposed that they had fallen into my eye-pouch. This eye-pouch was a slender, thin-walled purse, equipped with frail digestive powers that enabled it eventually to absorb eyelashes, strands of fabric, bits of grit, anything else that might stray into the eye. Well, the existence of this eye-pouch, it turned out, was all in my mind, and, it turns out, it is apparently there still, a brain-pouch, catching and absorbing small bits that fall deeply into my open eye.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

If there is such a place as "on top," if there is a sensation of riding a life span's crest, it does not last ten or twenty years. On the contrary, the crest is so small that I, for one, missed it altogether.

You are young, you are on your way up, when you cannot imagine how you will save yourself from death by boredom until dinner, until bed, until the next day arrives to be outwaited, and then, slow slap, the next. . . . Life by its mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven't the strength.

But momentum propels you over the crest. Imperceptibly, you start down. When do the days start to blur and then, breaking your heart, the seasons? The cards click faster in the spokes; you pitch forward. You roll headlong, out of control. The blur of the cards makes one long sound like a bomb's whine, the whine of many bombs, and you know your course is fatal.

Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk