ne and leaves so little room for his ideas.
Dillard's reaction is very similar to White's. While she points out the value of life lived in less hectic circumstances, thereby questioning the press of modern life, she also returns to America and resumes her writer's life. She feels a certain longing for the simpler life she witnesses in the jungle but, as the reader knows from the fact that her essay is in front of him/her, Dillard's choice is no different from that of the impressively wealthy writer, her fellow traveler who lives in Hollywood and Paris. Rather than taking on a simpler life herself all she is able to do is admire the life she has gone to see.
Neither writer addresses the reader directly. But each has a very different approach to the question of an audience. White begins by addressing his 'secretary' directly, ordering her to take a letter. He then begins to write to Thoreau and, essentially, is able to carry on in a very colloquial, relaxed, and humorous voice. The initial contrast between directing a secretary to take a letter, like any busy businessman, and writing to Thoreau sets up the tone of the essay and encapsulates its theme. He is, White implies, caught up in a rush but willing to take a few seconds out of his busy schedule to think about the importance of the slow contemplative life that enables one to think about one's natural surroundings. Dillard, however, immerses herself in those natural surroundings. But she admits that one can only do so on a visit. She begins by interrogating the notion that quiet places like Ecuador's Napo River are "out-of-the-way" and her question demands to know whether this place is out of the way of anything of value or merely out of the way of the things that people have come to value over "human life, tenderness, or the glance of heaven" (218).
Thus each writer draws the reader in by implying that he/she is like the reader. You know, White says, what it i...