Annie Dillard and her view on life

To prepare for todays class we read an excerpt of Annie Dillard’s work called ‘Fecundity’. In this Dillard used vivid imagery and small anecdotes to discuss her thoughts on reproduction, creating life and ultimately death. Dillard establishes the conflict in between human feelings and biological evolution. Humans have the ability to care about life and each other, as we are moral creatures. Dillard argues that we are the weird ones in our world for caring about others and that we do not fit in with the rest of life on Earth. Dillard argued, “Evolution loves death more than it loves you and me”, that is why many animals reproduce in excessive numbers but only a few survive, or for other animals their circumstances must be exactly right for them to survive. She takes the view point that reproduction and the creating of life is actually death, which for some animals it does mean dying. I found this to be a interesting view point because reproduction and life is usually treated as such a beautiful positive thing, not this intense fight for survival leaving most dead. I do not necessary agree with her though that humans do not fit into this amoral world and that we feel to much because humans can be so destructive. I believe humans try to be better than nature by using our values as guidelines but that we ultimately fail at being less ‘amoral’. We have killed millions in war and we kill millions of animals everyday just for our consumption, so we also bring a lot of death to this world. I think what separates us form nature is that we generally feel bad about the death we cause, where in Dillard’s interpretation nature doesn’t feel anything. I think we try to rise above our natural impulse towards death by using values and morals yet we seem to revert to violence quickly.