Living Like Weasels

In the essay, Living Like Weasels, Annie Dillard writes that she wishes we would live life like the weasels. She offers a series of anecdotes to show the characteristics of weasels and her relationship with and views on the animal. The authors purpose is to urge that we all take a lesson from the weasel on how to live life with true freedom. The author is addressing her readers, hoping that they relate to her desires to live a life based on necessity rather than choice.

1. The numbers work well in the essay because the author is making her points in chronological order. The breaks in the essay also serves to give the reader a chance to pause and reflect on what the author has written.

2. The author is saying that she wishes, like the weasel, she would be keen about her surroundings ("noticing everything",) but not dwell on the decisions she makes ("remembering nothing".) She wishes to have the sense to understand what's going on around her and do what she feels is necessary. However, she doesn't want to focus on the past one she has done an action. In life we often make decisions and look back in retrospect with guilt or shame. A weasel doesn't have this quality. Rather, he acts solely according to what is needed at the time.

5. By "wild," Dillard means to live according to instinct rather than thought. She writes, "...but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive." She sees this nature of the weasels as pure, not bogged down by the emotions and thought process of human beings.