“We are here on the planet only once, and we might as well get a feel for the place.” The advice of Annie Dillard — whose death at the age of 81 was announced today — who was supremely gifted at communicating that feel.

Last month, lacking protective glasses, I turned my back on a partial eclipse. I watched light stream through a colander, making marks that did turn gradually from dots to crescents. But the experience wasn’t exactly transporting. Then I read again the marks that Dillard made after witnessing a total eclipse in the Yakima Valley in Washington State in 1979… If you haven’t already got it, it’s worth buying her collection of essays, Teaching a Stone to Talk (Canongate), for that piece alone.

For many, travel is a way of recovering the wonder we felt as children. Dillard, one of America’s most brilliant essayists, never lost it. She combined a childlike curiosity with lightly worn learning and pared-down prose, and could make the boy in the next field as compelling a subject as the tribesman by the Amazon. Teaching a Stone to Talk has pieces that draw on travel, including one on the Galápagos Islands and one on the Ecuadorean jungle – where she and her fellow North Americans stayed up for a whole night talking and murmuring, “as though we rocked on hammocks slung above time”.

Her work is far from what would conventionally be described as “travel writing”. There is an extraordinary piece, for example, in which she segues between an account of ill-equipped Victorian explorers, setting out in search of the Pole, and of a congregation at Sunday Mass, intent on an encounter with God. “Wherever we go,” she writes, “there seems to be only one business at hand – that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.”

Dillard was a writer who was wholly attentive to the world; while you’re reading her pages, she makes you feel as though you are, too.