In And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, John Berger—the third point in the British triangle that enabled me, in a most un-Bermuda-like way, to find Dillard—writes that “the traffic between story-telling and metaphysics is continuous.” Here’s a little example of that (foot) traffic from Teaching a Stone to Talk (Annie Dillard):
You know what it is to open up a cottage. You barge in with your box of groceries and your duffel bag full of books. You drop them on a counter and rush to the far window to look out. I would say that coming into a cottage is like being born, except we do not come into the world with a box of groceries and a duffel bag full of books—unless you want to take these as metonymic symbols for culture. Opening up a summer cottage is like being born in this way: at the moment you enter, you have all the time you are ever going to have.
-Geoff Dyer in the forward to The Abundance