The Importance Of Life And Death In The Wreck Of Time By Annie Dillard

The question of whether life and death are significant seems to be such an obvious question and answer yet, is it really? Every single day millions of people will be born and millions of people will die, because of this, the concept of life and death are very prevalent in people’s lives. People seem to want to value the life that they possess on earth and make every moment count yet, does it all really matter in the end. We will all one day die and the earth will continue on without us, this is a truth that will never change. By reading many short stories, novels, and pieces written on the subject people will be able to gain some knowledge on whether or not life and death are significant in the grand scheme of things. Both life and death are

Humans have believed this since the beginning of time, valuing their survival and existence over animals, nature, and anything else that came in its way. Annie Dillard is an American author who has written many award-winning pieces in various genres, as well as been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. In Annie Dillard’s creative non-fiction essay “The Wreck of Time”, she discusses the effects of human life on the planet and human population within the last century. She introduces the idea that “there must be something ultimately heroic about our time, something that sets it above all those other times” (Dillard 56). This idea is that people value human life that is spent here on earth and the lives of everyone around them. People believe that each century becomes more and more valuable and impactful towards the progression of our society. People see that in ‘those other times’ people were not as smart as they are now and didn’t contribute as much to the world. Due to this, the value of human life only continues to increase as the impact that one human being can contribute also increases. During one’s life they will form connections and relationships that they value and find to be extremely important within their personal

In “The Wreck of Time” Dillard addresses the fact that we are all a part of a never-ending cycle and those “who breathe air now will join the already dead layers of us who breathed air once. We arise from dirt and dwindle to dirt, and the might of the universe is arrayed against us” (Dillard 56). The fact that we are not the first ones to breathe this air and certainly will not be the last address the fact that our existence means nothing. The people before us were capable of doing exactly what we have done and the people to come after us will do the same. This ongoing cycle of life is not changing or disappearing in any way and will be how the world works for the foreseeable future. Similarly, in the poetic essay “Looking for the Road” by Breyten Breytenbach, the narrator discusses the need for travel in order to experience the same things those before us have seen. The narrator discusses how their own experiences have allowed them to “take the words with [them] like grains of sand in [their] shoe after having bowed to the dwelling of a night, to mix these with a desert of footfalls—always new, always the same” (Breytenbach 197). The grains of sand existing on earth have always been here and don’t ever change, similarly to how the people on earth may seem to change but they really don’t. Each generation is different in their own ways, yet to