Annie Dillard was born the day Hitler died, eighteen days after FDR died, as if in her the whole history and destiny of America was reincarnated, triumphant, superpowered. She welcomed this synecdoche, played the all-American writer willingly—this was one of her magic tricks, the universalization of one white woman’s mind. Like most sleights of hand, she did this by manipulating your attention. It is possible there has never been a greater, a gentler, a more gripping English-language handler of the world’s most refractory material: your senses, your sentience. She wrote like the weasel who “bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake.…