Dillard and Wodehouse

don't appear, at first glance, to have much in common as writers.

Annie Dillard has been described as a "twentieth-century anchorite" and an "ecotheologist". Won a Pulitzer at twenty-nine for her nonfiction narrative, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. I turn to her when I want to be jolted awake and launched off a cliff.

P.G. Wodehouse, born sixty-four years before Dillard, was an incredibly prolific novelist who wrote brilliant comedy about the pre-war English upper classes.

Why do I bring them up together? They are the two writers I never read on buses, trains, in public places. Because each of them can reduce me to a helpless mass of uncontrollable, impossible-to-muffle, snorts-and-gasps laughter with a single sentence.

Dillard:
Few sights are so absurd as that of an inchworm leading its dimwit life.

- The Writing Life (1989)

Wodehouse:
"What a curse these social distinctions are. They ought to be abolished. I remmeber saying that to Karl Marx once, and he thought there might be an idea for a book in it."

- Quick Service (1940)