The Raw World Text

Allow me to share with you an excerpt from Annie Dillard's "Living By Fiction" which I finished this morning.

"Can we not loose the methods of literary criticism upon the raw world? May we not analyze the breadth of our experience? We can and may--but only if we first consider the raw world as a text, as a meaningful, purposefully fashioned creation, as a work of art. For we have seen that critics interpret artifacts only. Our interpreting the universe as an artifact absolutely requires that we posit an author for it, or a celestial filmmaker, dramatist, painter, sculptor, composer, architect, or choreographer...

This, clearly, would be a religious, even creationist, reading of the universe. Note how it differs from pantheism. It reads the universe as a significant art object, not as part of a stream of being which includes the observer, and not as personal message. Pantheism is not the only meaningful reading of the natural world. One need not find a spirit in each bush and rock for these things to mean. The bush and rock may be, as it were, literary symbols. But of what? If we could only see the first draft, or locate some letters!" (Dillard 144).