To Annie Dillard’s Astonishment

Human life is privy to a panorama of holiness, the sight and experience of which we’ve grown immaculately skilled at obscuring. As Emerson observed: “Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.”

Richard Linklater takes this a step further in his film, Waking Life. A scene documents a conversation between…