THIS IS THE LIFE By Annie Dillard from the Fall issue of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, published by the Center for Religious Humanism at Seattle Pacific University. Dillard's most recent book is For the Time Being. Any culture tells you how to live your one and only life: to wit as everyone else does. Probably most cultures prize, as ours rightly does, making a contribution by working hard at work that …showed first 75 words of 1446 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1446 total…they count and figure, they boil the pot, they keep the embers alive; they tell their stories and gird themselves. Will knowledge you experience directly make you a Buddhist? Must you forfeit excitement per se? To what end? Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time's soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?