Meaning

This line draws attention to something easy to overlook: the relationship between the texture of ordinary hours and the shape of an entire life. Grand intentions and future plans are made of the same material as Tuesday mornings and idle afternoons. If our days are scattered or half-present, then in a very real sense so are our lives, regardless of what we imagine we are saving ourselves for.

Context

Annie Dillard wrote this in her 1989 book about the experience of being a writer, a work that meditates on craft, discipline, and the strangeness of committing oneself to work done largely alone and in silence. The observation appears in that context as both a warning and an encouragement: the writer who waits for ideal conditions is spending a life of waiting. More broadly, the line speaks to anyone who has ever felt that real living is something beginning soon, just around some corner not yet reached.

About the author

Annie Dillard is an American author whose work spans literary nonfiction, memoir, poetry, and fiction. She received the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for her early work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a close and meditative study of the natural world. Throughout her career she has been admired for prose that is simultaneously precise and expansive, capable of moving from the smallest observed detail to questions of time, consciousness, and the nature of existence. She has also taught writing and contributed essays to a wide range of publications.