Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
4/5
()
About this ebook
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. . . . There is an ambition about her book that I like. . . . It is the ambition to feel.” — Eudora Welty, New York Times Book Review
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, where Annie Dillard set out to chronicle incidents of "beauty tangled in a rapture with violence."
Dillard's personal narrative highlights one year's exploration on foot in the Virginia region through which Tinker Creek runs. In the summer, she stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall, she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays King of the Meadow with a field of grasshoppers. The result is an exhilarating tale of nature and its seasons.
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, The Living and The Maytrees. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Read more from Annie Dillard
The Writing Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Annie Dillard Reader Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsInventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Holy the Firm Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An American Childhood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Encounters with Chinese Writers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Living by Fiction Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Encounters with Chinese Writers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Mountain Blood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Modern American Memoirs: 1917-1992 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Related ebooks
Holy the Firm Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Virga & Bone: Essays from Dry Places Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Islands, the Universe, Home: Essays Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An American Childhood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wendell Berry: Life and Work Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShadows on the Rock Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Is Happiness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5West with the Night Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Country of the Pointed Firs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Solace of Open Spaces: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Peregrine: 50th Anniversary Edition: Afterword by Robert Macfarlane Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Middlemarch Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5O Pioneers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Encounters with Chinese Writers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Desert Solitaire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mogens, and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My First Summer in the Sierra Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wilderness Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Capture the Castle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Taking Root: The Nature Writing of William and Adam Summer of Pomaria Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5My Antonia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tinkers: 10th Anniversary Edition Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Reviews for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
164 ratings46 reviews
What our readers think
Readers find this title to be a mix of plodding and stream of consciousness writing. Some readers appreciate the artfulness and the way it makes them pause and reflect. However, there are unrelated and spammy reviews that should be ignored.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book took me a while to get through mostly because I was reading others in between it. I can honestly say that I did enjoy most of it. Some parts I was pretty confused as to what Dillard was talking about but for the most part it was good. The reason I didn't like it so much because it was a journal type book. Annie Dillard wrote about her musings while living out near Tinker Creek. I normally wouldn't read something like this, but it was interesting. What I really like about it was the fact that it made you think about the world and whats around it. So all in all 3/5 stars.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5While I really admired Annie Dillard's pure rapture for the natural world, I found the "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" somewhat tedious. Dillard really knows how put together an overwrought scene... absolutely flogging and interesting moment to death.There are lots of interesting tidbits about the natural world scattered throughout the book, but it can be tough to make it through the passages in between them. I liked that the book focused not only on the beauty of nature, but its cruelty and violence too.Overall, I found it an interesting musing, but hard to get through due to the way it was written.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I live relatively near Tinker Creek (always think of that big truck stop just down the road), and being a "local" author was interested from that point of reference. Very dreamy, lovely read that evoked the mountains and the musings that most of us do around here. Peter Matthiessen is the master of this contemplative naturalist literature. This book of Dillard comes close.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It is appropriate to re-read this book during The Year of Darwin, as, among other things, it is an extended exploration of the principles of evolution as they intersect with human life and spirituality. I'm not surprised my pastor said it was required reading in seminary.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This book is like a book of blog posts, you know, before there were blogs. Annie Dillard lives on Tinker Creek. She documents, in stream of consciousness essay style, some of her observations of nature. She throws in some facts that she "knows" (in quotes because there were a few things that were wrong, but my science education started 20 years after this was published, so I don't fault her) and goes off on a lot of tangents. She'll start with something and end up talking about newly sighted blind people, or of contradictions or of God or of nature's profligate waste or whatever it is that's floating around in her head.
The book was somewhat difficult for me. It wanders and meanders. One one hand, she goes on about some scene she has seen in nature, which is delightful to read and reminds me of some of the remarkable things I've seen in nature. On the other hand, she wanders into tangents that either don't matter or are not interesting. Because she takes her time to meander around subjects and go off into the most boring series of thoughts, it was hard for me to continue reading. However, I thought her writing was beautiful. The prose was absolutely gorgeous. It's like finding some food that has the most amazing texture. It slides down the tongue of your brain in pure textural delight. The problem is, the flavor is terrible.
I will admit, I'm not a fan of stream of conscious style writing. I rarely have trouble reading it (Faulkner notwithstanding), I can't help but find it annoying. And it's the whole book.
There's a lot of philosophy - God and contradictions. Thoughts of nature and fecundity and waste and destiny and randomness and observation vs seeing and innocence and self-awareness. I like my books to be about something, not about being about something.
The philosophical wanderings in this book do feel young. Kind of like a bunch of college students. They're young and brilliant and invincible and sitting on the floor, drunk, after a party discussing deep, deep thoughts. It's that kind of young metaphysical meanderings.
One of the things that bugged me the most about this book was the anthropomorphizing of so much. She did it for nature, for bugs, for trees. For someone who likes to pull in science or facts (yeah I know, she also blathers about God and other silliness), it just annoyed me. Probably more than it should have, given the kind of book it is.
Sometimes, when I'm reading, my mind wanders. I find myself 4 or 5 pages further than I last remember... I've been reading, but not reading. I have to go back and re-read to catch what I missed. I did that a lot in this book, except that my mind never wandered. I just couldn't be bothered to digest what I was being fed. Eventually I learned to ignore the metaphysical junk and just focus on the anecdotes of nature and enjoy those. And it made the book a little easier to bear.
It's deep. It's spiritual. It's pretty. I get it, I just don't care. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In Salvation Means Creation Healed, Snyder lists the various ways in which God's creation is misunderstood. One of those ways is the romanticization of nature. When we romanticize nature we ignore all the nasty bits—biting mosquitoes, parasites, carnivorous critters—and pretend it's somehow pristine and pre-fallen.Dillard makes no such mistake.The greatest strength of Annie Dillard is her ability to describe in compelling detail the beauty and terror of the natural world in her own back yard.In one chapter, she's amazed at how a tree can transform "gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud, and flower" (112). A few chapter's later she's horrified by a nightmare occasioned by watching two huge luna moths mate—"the perfect picture of utter spirituality and utter degradation" (159).Speaking of spirituality, Dillard's reflections on creation are profound, ultimately drawing her into praise:"My left foot says 'Glory,' and my right food says 'Amen': in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise" (271).Like poetry, Dillard's prose has to be savored slowly. This is the sort of writing that should be read aloud—every syllable is expertly placed.Pilgrim is a classic for good reason. Dillard has paired her keen and honest observation skills with her beautiful mastery of language.You will read this book more than once.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I want to like Annie Dillard, I really do. I think the world is a better place because Annie Dillard thinks and writes as she does. But, the bugs. Lots and lots of looking at, thinking about, and describing bugs. Some other creatures too, both larger and smaller than bugs, but mostly bugs. As much as I appreciate the conclusions Dillard draws about the natural world and the nature of God, her minute observations about critters and plants could barely hold my attention. I took pious pleasure in finishing the book, like I had done something that, while a little boring, had it’s interesting moments and made me a better person – kind of like going to church.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is a beautiful essay on the joy and wonder of seeing Nature. I just love this book. Annie Dillard writes about the mystical beauty and mystery of nature.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nature writing is one of my favorites genres and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is on many "must read" lists. What I found most interesting is how the book reflected the time period when it was written. The early 70s were a time when many people were talking about our relationship with the environment. The first Earth Day and the Clean Air act are a couple examples. Like Thoreau, Dillard spends time exploring and observing nature. For me, the most interesting aspect was the way she conducted inquiries into topics of interest throughout the book. Rather than simply observing nature, she sought to understand the area around Tinker Creek and connect it to the larger environment. Whether talking about frogs, caterpillars, or muskrats, she motivates readers to pick up a science book and learn more. Although the writing is a little flowery at times, I can understand why it won the Pulitzer Prize.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A glorious work by someone who has mastered the English language and has put together something of sheer brilliance. My only frustration with the book was how unfortunate it was that I had not read it until this point. She paints a vivid picture of her backyard and invites us in to observe what she does and we are lead to places overlooked. I hope to come back into this gem often.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Annie Dillard has a talent for combining reflection, introspection, anecdotes, and the many things she's read in a fascinating mixture. I've enjoyed all her books, but this one is my favorite by far. I found it inspirational for my own writing when I read it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5"I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck." For me, this quote captures both the pilgrim spirit and the poetic beauty of this collection of interwoven essays. Dillard's prose is exquisite. Her fascination with the natural world, freshly revealed on every page, is thoroughly contagious.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This was a dense book that Karen chose for our book discussion group. Dillard lives beside Tinker Creek in Virginia and records nature and her interpretation of it in an extremely detailed fashion. She purposely keeps herself and her feelings out of the writing. One story that is rather gruesome seems to become a metaphor - she mentions it several times in the book. Once she was walking beside the creek and saw a small green frog. He didn't move as she approached. She watched as his eyes went lifeless and then his skin floated away. A giant water bug had sucked his guts out.I enjoyed her chapter on seeing and coincidentally read it in March on a plane to Florida. Dillard encourages us to look deeper and deeper, closer and closer into things, to keep our eyes open and to look at the minutia. She scooped water out of the creek and brought it home. Silt settled to the bottom and then she took a drop out and looked at it under a microscope to examine the amoeba. Interesting facts from the book - spring moves northward at the rate of 16 miles per day. A big elm in a single season can make six million leaves.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It won the Pulitzer. It is revered by nature writers. It is lyrical. It is boring.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5While Bryson, regretfully, only pays attention to natural history in intermissive fashion (although his interest in the field is apparent), Annie Dillard is celebrated as one of the major natural history authors in America. However, in my opinion the text is 'too feminine' with less attention to actual botany and wildlife, and more holistically describing the overall experience of nature. Furthermore, at least in this book, there seem to be too many side steps to other topics, in pure essaistic style. Major influences and natural history writers are mentioned in the book. A light read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Annie Dillard is a phenomenon. Her deeply insightful musings on the wonder of the universe that she records over the seasons around Tinker Creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains are a triumphant, exuberant demonstration of what the human mind can communicate through literature. She is in a unique place in her wandering, in awe, jaw droppingly horrified and profoundly mystical in her embrace of this world around us and the life that fills it. This is one of the best books I have ever read.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The first thing that grabbed my attention as I began reading this book is the loveliness of its prose. The sentences are long and vivid and full of color. After forty or so pages, the line between colorful and purple begins to blur. Throughout the books, there are lines, or even a whole page, that shines. The sentiment and the language converge and deliver some powerful declaration, or pose excellent some cosmic query. However, the book slogs after awhile. I think you must go into Tinker Creek expecting highly self-referential field notes on wildlife, complimented by quotations and views Dillard uncovers in whatever she is reading at the time of such observations, and peppered with Biblical allusions. Dillard isn't necessarily preachy here, the allusions fit nicely enough within the wonder of her setting, but they sometimes feel a bit forced rather natural, as though she had to meet some quota on biblical references. At her best, Dillard shows us the majesty of nature through her eyes, all at once violent and beautiful. Despite this, I was frequently bored with her descriptions. It all began to seem too familiar. A uniquely presented work, but I suppose I'd be more apt to return to Barry Lopez if I wanted to run about the wild and winged things of the Earth.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Overwritten, but beautifully so. And justifyably so: The dramatic extravagance of her prose reflects the inexhaustible spectacle of nature itself. She was 27 in 1972 when she wrote these reflections on nature, science, theology, and whatever tidbits of information were caputured, pinned to a table, and analyzed by the quixotic butterfly net of her mind. This is not a romantic ode to the beauty of nature. Yes, she sees the beauty but she sees the horror also: the transience of life, the meaninglessness of death, the frank speculation about what kind of a God set this all in motion.The framework of the book is a series of chapters corresponding to the seasons of one year as she explores the woods near her home in Virginia. Interspersed with her own observations are tidbits of science, followed by metaphysical interpretations. She sees, she wonders, she writes. Her responses to nature are visceral:"A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn't make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn't catch the consonant that shaped it into sense."This would be a great book to take on a camping trip or retreat. It is a book that I will revisit throughout my life like an old friend.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I needed to read a book like this right now. Dillard appreciates things within nature like a small child or a born-blind person with new sight.. noticing things down to the tiniest detail. (Literally -- she occasionally busts out a microscope and takes a gander at pond scum.) I only wish I was like that. I learned a ton of stunning nature based facts. And like I said, I really needed to read something nature based and appreciative of the little things. (I'm at the point of wishing I was sitting solitary in the middle of the woods and what better way to do things you can't really do than to read about it? Nature is always there for me to appreciate.) Dillard has studied theology so I was very surprised (and pleased) that she wasn't writing more about religion. This reminded me of the essays of Barbara Kingsolver and her book Prodigal Summer is almost a fictional story of someone like Annie Dillard.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I dimly remember reading Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek back in the 70s. Recently, seeing excerpts and hearing gushing praise, I decided to have another look. One her website, Dillard has written the following, “I can no longer travel, can't meet with strangers, can't sign books but will sign labels with SASE, can't write by request, and can't answer letters. I've got to read and concentrate. Why? Beats me. // Please don't use Wikipedia. It is unreliable; anyone can post anything, no matter how wrong. For example, an article by Mary Cantwell misquotes me wildly. The teacher in me says, "The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts." Here is some information for scholars. (I’ve posted this web-page in defense; a crook bought the name and printed dirty pictures, then offered to sell it to me. I bit. In the course of that I learned the web is full of misinformation. This is a corrective.)"My twenty-fifth-anniversary edition also has a blurb by Eudora Welty, who describes the work better than I can. Welty writes, “The book is a form of meditation written with headlong urgency about seeing, A reader’s heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled. […] There is an ambition about her book that I like […] It is the ambition to feel.” That is precisely the effect Pilgrim had on me. Dillard spends much of her time looking at nature, plants, trees, insects, flora and fauna. Her wanderings bear a close resemblance to Thoreau’s wanderings around Walden Pond. She writes, “It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a life-time of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get” (17).I marked numerous passages and selecting good examples was no easy task. I loved the one about pennies, and it struck me that my habit of up picking coins of all sorts might have begun when I first read Dillard. Here is another of my favorites, “This is the sort of stuff I read all winter. The books I read are like the stone men built by the Eskimos of the great desolate tundra west of Hudson’s Bay. They still build them today, according to Farley Mowat. An Eskimo traveling alone in the flat barrens will heap round stones to the height of a man, travel until he can no longer see the beacon, and build another. So I travel mute among these books, these eyeless men and women that people the empty plain. I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I’m terrified that I’ll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake” (44).If it has been a while since you walked with Annie Dillard, pick up Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, slow down, stop and smell Nature. 5 stars.--Jim, 5/28/16
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Solipsistic indulgence for those with the luxury of luxury but not the luxury solipsism. Kind of disappointing as this was on my to read list for years. Is it misogynistic to say it doesn't help that Tavia Gilbert sounds like a mom? Is it immature? Someone call me on my guilt for not caring about this person's summer vacation!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Annie enjoys nature in Puget Sound. More introspective than my tastes today
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Indescribable - very trippy meditation on being still, seeing, art, time. Beautifully written and leaves you with much to think about.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I'm not sure how anyone wrote such a book unless it was by hanging a tape recorder around the neck. A torrent of thoughts and useless information - some interesting.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I came to The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek having just completed Ann Lamott’s Traveling Mercies. Both texts embody spiritual journeys. Both texts approach the world in general, from my perspective. It was not the appropriate order in which to read these books. I have read other Dillard texts – and have heard her speak – I’ve always been a fan. I found myself distracted, restless and impatient in the beginning pages of the book. Nothing moved. Oh sure, Tinker Creek moved, but the action of a creek is somewhat sedate.In general, I pace my reading gauging the time it will take to read any given text based on the number of pages therein, and knowing the speed at which I read. I estimated The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to be a three to four day read. But creeks and muskrats move slower than that, not to mention crickets and spiders. Dillard’s purpose seemed to be to slow down the reader – to engage on a more subtle level. Her pilgrimage slowed me down, forced me to take deep breaths and walk in the meadow west of my house.But I found myself wondering, about a third of the way in, on the day my phone bill was due, how is she paying for this luxurious life? How can she wander the shores of Tinker Creek for hours on end, undisturbed by the outside world and its cares? How is she eating? This was a gap in the text that I simply could not get beyond. I loved her language and her ability to show me her surrounding and emotional and intellectual reaction to those surroundings, but the text as a whole remained very surreal and abstract for me. Unlike Lamott’s text which at times was entirely too real.In both texts there was a search for God. Both texts had strong feminine voices and perspectives. And yet, they are polar opposites. For Lamott God is to be found in the busyness of life while for Dillard God lives in the quiet places. Dillard’s biblical references always caught me off-guard. Hers seems to be a more native, pagan approach to life and yet her very Christian presentation does not feel or seem out of place in the pages of her book. The juxtaposition of the texts has given me a perspective in my own writing – do I fall into one camp or the other? In my heart, I think I must learn to fall between the two.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It is more than an exercise in note-taking and observation to record evidence of such present moments as happen when eyes are open and time is abundant. Annie Dillard tells the story of built moments, crafted from the accidents of pond life and sunshine and floods. She would be a hoarder of facts but for her willingness to share them in aid of curiosity and storytelling. And it is her storytelling that weaves as novelists do and allows her readers almost to forget that what she tells you is not simply fact, it is truth.I have relished this book as one would a box of fine chocolates or bottle of delicious tequila and was equally distressed for it to end. It is not for everyone, but for those who can fall into the world as seen through the eyes of Ms. Dillard, it is a delight and a wonder.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I am so utterly envious of Dillard. She writes with such poise and it seems effortless, as though the words are just falling out of the air into her pen. Some of the descriptions are just fantastic. The best part of my public school education was this book. Can you imagine she wrote this so young? I have to say I don't like her later books as much as this one. HIGHLY recommended.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Way too much fluff, and too little substance. I would read several pages at a time before I realized I hadn't learned anything worthwhile, if not anything at all. Would not recommend.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is one of the best books I have ever read. Her writing is spectacular. It is exhilarating to read her descriptions of nature, and her own path toward meaning.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This was one of those books that made me wish I had taken a much earlier interest in literature and creative writing. I am absolutely sure I would have gotten more enjoyment from this book than I did had that been the case. Commentary I’ve read about it compared Annie Dillard’s work to Thoreau and the other transcendentalists. Of course, I had precious little exposure to them in school so the comparison is largely lost on me. I did not pursue creative writing beyond the minimum requirements imposed on me as part of my course of study, so the style, rhythm and cadence of this work didn’t resonate with me at anything but a superficial level. So, my opinion of it will necessarily be based on my experiences and education.
I kind of view this book the way I would look at an abstract painting; like an artist trying to portray their feeling about a physical place or object through their art, the author here is trying to do the same with words. The book I think employs a narrative form and consists of several reflections and internal monologues on nature, existence, life, death and religion. It all revolves around the environment near the authors home adjacent to Tinker Creek in Virginia. The book is divided into four sections representing the seasons, and within each section chapters that enhance and amplify the larger theme.
I really enjoyed much of this, particularly sections in which Dillard would focus her observations on a particular animal or event. Monologues describing her efforts to get close to the muskrats living in the creek, her fleeting attempts to observe fish and insects were very enjoyable. She also did a wonderful, almost mystical, job of incorporating the latest (at the time) discoveries in the fields of physics, astronomy and chemistry into the narrative as though those aspects of the physical world were as much a part of her immediate surroundings as were the insects, birds and reptiles she was observing.
Some parts I didn’t buy, particularly the overall theological theme. Dillard describes her work as a theodicy – the study of why a benevolent God would allow manifestations of evil in the world. The cut throat existence most living beings endure in nature are used as examples. The often cruel and gruesome ways many of “Gods” creatures meet their ends is used as the anchor point for this exploration. Being an atheist I don’t believe there is any deeper meaning other than that evolution provides for. Creatures exist and evolve as a consequence of the environment they live it, not because some benevolent God has allowed it. So these themes had no resonance with me.
She uses the concepts of via positiva and the via negativa, with the first half of the book being the former and the last half the latter. The first refers to the notion that God is present in nature and is in some way knowable. The second refers to a God which cannot be comprehended and therefore what happens in the world are only attributes of God’s will and not a knowable truth. Dillard finds the latter more attractive based on her observations of the natural world as represented at Tinker Creek. Of course from my perspective there is no will at work here as there is no supreme being to work that will. I understand things as part of a quantifiable and understandable process that doesn’t contain the mystery Dilalrd see around her.
Nevertheless I came away from reading this feeling closer to the nature Dillard describes than a dry recitation of fact could ever convey. I think there is something in all of us that wants the world around us and our place in it to have a higher meaning. I think that desire is a result of an evolutionary impulse. Yet, it is within me and works such as this satisfy some of that need.
Book preview
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The name of the publisher, “HarperCollins e-books” is shown, with its logo as a stylized set of flames atop waves.Dedication
for Richard
Epigraph
It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.
—HERACLITUS
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1. Heaven and Earth in Jest
2. Seeing
3. Winter
4. The Fixed
5. Untying the Knot
6. The Present
7. Spring
8. Intricacy
9. Flood
10. Fecundity
11. Stalking
12. Nightwatch
13. The Horns of the Altar
14. Northing
15. The Waters of Separation
Afterword
More Years Afterward
About Annie Dillard
About the Author
Also by Annie Dillard
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
Heaven and Earth in Jest
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I’d half-awaken. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.
It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence. . . . Seem like we’re just set down here,
a woman said to me recently, and don’t nobody know why.
These are morning matters, pictures you dream as the final wave heaves you up on the sand to the bright light and drying air. You remember pressure, and a curved sleep you rested against, soft, like a scallop in its shell. But the air hardens your skin; you stand; you leave the lighted shore to explore some dim headland, and soon you’re lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing.
I still think of that old tomcat, mornings, when I wake. Things are tamer now; I sleep with the window shut. The cat and our rites are gone and my life is changed, but the memory remains of something powerful playing over me. I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing. If I’m lucky I might be jogged awake by a strange bird call. I dress in a hurry, imagining the yard flapping with auks, or flamingos. This morning it was a wood duck, down at the creek. It flew away.
I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks—Tinker and Carvin’s—are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection. The mountains—Tinker and Brushy, McAfee’s Knob and Dead Man—are a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.
The wood duck flew away. I caught only a glimpse of something like a bright torpedo that blasted the leaves where it flew. Back at the house I ate a bowl of oatmeal; much later in the day came the long slant of light that means good walking.
If the day is fine, any walk will do; it all looks good. Water in particular looks its best, reflecting blue sky in the flat, and chopping it into graveled shallows and white chute and foam in the riffles. On a dark day, or a hazy one, everything’s washed-out and lackluster but the water. It carries its own lights. I set out for the railroad tracks, for the hill the flocks fly over, for the woods where the white mare lives. But I go to the water.
Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet. Kazantzakis says that when he was young he had a canary and a globe. When he freed the canary, it would perch on the globe and sing. All his life, wandering the earth, he felt as though he had a canary on top of his mind, singing.
West of the house, Tinker Creek makes a sharp loop, so that the creek is both in back of the house, south of me, and also on the other side of the road, north of me. I like to go north. There the afternoon sun hits the creek just right, deepening the reflected blue and lighting the sides of trees on the banks. Steers from the pasture across the creek come down to drink; I always flush a rabbit or two there; I sit on a fallen trunk in the shade and watch the squirrels in the sun. There are two separated wooden fences suspended from cables that cross the creek just upstream from my tree-trunk bench. They keep the steers from escaping up or down the creek when they come to drink. Squirrels, the neighborhood children, and I use the downstream fence as a swaying bridge across the creek. But the steers are there today.
I sit on the downed tree and watch the black steers slip on the creek bottom. They are all bred beef: beef heart, beef hide, beef hocks. They’re a human product like rayon. They’re like a field of shoes. They have cast-iron shanks and tongues like foam insoles. You can’t see through to their brains as you can with other animals; they have beef fat behind their eyes, beef stew.
I cross the fence six feet above the water, walking my hands down the rusty cable and tightroping my feet along the narrow edge of the planks. When I hit the other bank and terra firma, some steers are bunched in a knot between me and the barbed-wire fence I want to cross. So I suddenly rush at them in an enthusiastic sprint, flailing my arms and hollering, Lightning! Copperhead! Swedish meatballs!
They flee, still in a knot, stumbling across the flat pasture. I stand with the wind on my face.
When I slide under a barbed-wire fence, cross a field, and run over a sycamore trunk felled across the water, I’m on a little island shaped like a tear in the middle of Tinker Creek. On one side of the creek is a steep forested bank; the water is swift and deep on that side of the island. On the other side is the level field I walked through next to the steers’ pasture; the water between the field and the island is shallow and sluggish. In summer’s low water, flags and bulrushes grow along a series of shallow pools cooled by the lazy current. Water striders patrol the surface film, crayfish hump along the silt bottom eating filth, frogs shout and glare, and shiners and small bream hide among roots from the sulky green heron’s eye. I come to this island every month of the year. I walk around it, stopping and staring, or I straddle the sycamore log over the creek, curling my legs out of the water in winter, trying to read. Today I sit on dry grass at the end of the island by the slower side of the creek. I’m drawn to this spot. I come to it as to an oracle; I return to it as a man years later will seek out the battlefield where he lost a leg or an arm.
A couple of summers ago I was walking along the edge of the island to see what I could see in the water, and mainly to scare frogs. Frogs have an inelegant way of taking off from invisible positions on the bank just ahead of your feet, in dire panic, emitting a froggy Yike!
and splashing into the water. Incredibly, this amused me, and, incredibly, it amuses me still. As I walked along the grassy edge of the island, I got better and better at seeing frogs both in and out of the water. I learned to recognize, slowing down, the difference in texture of the light reflected from mud bank, water, grass, or frog. Frogs were flying all around me. At the end of the island I noticed a small green frog. He was exactly half in and half out of the water, looking like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didn’t jump.
He didn’t jump; I crept closer. At last I knelt on the island’s winter killed grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in the creek just four feet away. He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag started to sink.
I had read about the giant water bug, but never seen one. Giant water bug
is really the name of the creature, which is an enormous, heavy-bodied brown bug. It eats insects, tadpoles, fish, and frogs. Its grasping forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes a victim with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the only bite it ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim’s muscles and bones and organs—all but the skin—and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim’s body, reduced to a juice. This event is quite common in warm fresh water. The frog I saw was being sucked by a giant water bug. I had been kneeling on the island grass; when the unrecognizable flap of frog skin settled on the creek bottom, swaying, I stood up and brushed the knees of my pants. I couldn’t catch my breath.
Of course, many carnivorous animals devour their prey alive. The usual method seems to be to subdue the victim by downing or grasping it so it can’t flee, then eating it whole or in a series of bloody bites. Frogs eat everything whole, stuffing prey into their mouths with their thumbs. People have seen frogs with their wide jaws so full of live dragonflies they couldn’t close them. Ants don’t even have to catch their prey: in the spring they swarm over newly hatched, featherless birds in the nest and eat them tiny bite by bite.
That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, "The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" It’s a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator’s, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? God is subtle,
Einstein said, but not malicious.
Again, Einstein said that nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning.
It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God set bars and doors
and said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.
But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
Another time I saw another wonder: sharks off the Atlantic coast of Florida. There is a way a wave rises above the ocean horizon, a triangular wedge against the sky. If you stand where the ocean breaks on a shallow beach, you see the raised water in a wave is translucent, shot with lights. One late afternoon at low tide a hundred big sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a feeding frenzy. As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six-or eight-foot-long bodies of twisting sharks. The sharks disappeared as each wave rolled toward me; then a new wave would swell above the horizon, containing in it, like scorpions in amber, sharks that roiled and heaved. The sight held awesome wonders: power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence.
We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, Come down to the water.
It was an extravagant gesture, but we can’t do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
I have come to the grassy island late in the day. The creek is up; icy water sweeps under the sycamore log bridge. The frog skin, of course, is utterly gone. I have stared at that one spot on the creek bottom for so long, focusing past the rush of water, that when I stand, the opposite bank seems to stretch before my eyes and flow grassily upstream. When the bank settles down I cross the sycamore log and enter again the big plowed field next to the steers’ pasture.
The wind is terrific out of the west; the sun comes and goes. I can see the shadow on the field before me deepen uniformly and spread like a plague. Everything seems so dull I am amazed I can even distinguish objects. And suddenly the light runs across the land like a comber, and up the trees, and goes again in a wink: I think I’ve gone blind or died. When it comes again, the light, you hold your breath, and if it stays you forget about it until it goes again.
It’s the most beautiful day of the year. At four o’clock the eastern sky is a dead stratus black flecked with low white clouds. The sun in the west illuminates the ground, the mountains, and especially the bare branches of trees, so that everywhere silver trees cut into the black sky like a photographer’s negative of a landscape. The air and the ground are dry; the mountains are going on and off like neon signs. Clouds slide east as if pulled from the horizon, like a tablecloth whipped off a table. The hemlocks by the barbed-wire fence are flinging themselves east as though their backs would break. Purple shadows are racing east; the wind makes me face east, and again I feel the dizzying, drawn sensation I felt when the creek bank reeled.
At four-thirty the sky in the east is clear; how could that big blackness be blown? Fifteen minutes later another darkness is coming overhead from the northwest; and it’s here. Everything is drained of its light as if sucked. Only at the horizon do inky black mountains give way to distant, lighted mountains—lighted not by direct illumination but rather paled by glowing sheets of mist hung before them. Now the blackness is in the east; everything is half in shadow, half in sun, every clod, tree, mountain, and hedge. I can’t see Tinker Mountain through the line of hemlock, till it comes on like a streetlight, ping, ex nihilo. Its sandstone cliffs pink and swell. Suddenly the light goes; the cliffs recede as if pushed. The sun hits a clump of sycamores between me and the mountains; the sycamore arms light up, and I can’t see the cliffs. They’re gone. The pale network of sycamore arms, which a second ago was transparent as a screen, is suddenly opaque, glowing with light. Now the sycamore arms snuff out, the mountains come on, and there are the cliffs again.
I walk home. By five-thirty the show has pulled out. Nothing is left but an unreal blue and a few banked clouds low in the north. Some sort of carnival magician has been here, some fast-talking worker of wonders who has the act backwards. Something in this hand,
he says, something in this hand, something up my sleeve, something behind my back . . .
and abracadabra, he snaps his fingers, and it’s all gone. Only the bland, blank-faced magician remains, in his unruffled coat, bare handed, acknowledging a smattering of baffled applause. When you look again the whole show has pulled up stakes and moved on down the road. It never stops. New shows roll in from over the mountains and the magician reappears unannounced from a fold in the curtain you never dreamed was an opening. Scarves of clouds, rabbits in plain view, disappear into the black hat forever. Presto chango. The audience, if there is an audience at all, is dizzy from head-turning, dazed.
Like the bear who went over the mountain, I went out to see what I could see. And, I might as well warn you, like the bear, all that I could see was the other side of the mountain: more of same. On a good day I might catch a glimpse of another wooded ridge rolling under the sun like water, another bivouac. I propose to keep here what Thoreau called a meteorological journal of the mind,
telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead.
I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn’t the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.
So I think about the valley. It is my leisure as well as my work, a game. It is a fierce game I have joined because it is being played anyway, a game of both skill and chance, played against an unseen adversary—the conditions of time—in which the payoffs, which may suddenly arrive in a blast of light at any moment, might as well come to me as anyone else. I stake the time I’m grateful to have, the energies I’m glad to direct. I risk getting stuck on the board, so to speak, unable to move in any direction, which happens enough, God knows; and I risk the searing, exhausting nightmares that plunder rest and force me face down all night long in some muddy ditch seething with hatching insects and crustaceans.
But if I can bear the nights, the days are a pleasure. I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.
I am an explorer, then, and I am also a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself. Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves lightning marks,
because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees. The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood.
Something pummels us, something barely sheathed. Power broods and lights. We’re played on like a pipe; our breath is not our own. James Houston describes two young Eskimo girls sitting cross-legged on the ground, mouth on mouth, blowing by turns each other’s throat cords, making a low, unearthly music. When I cross again the bridge that is really the steers’ fence, the wind has thinned to the delicate air of twilight; it crumples the water’s skin. I watch the running sheets of light raised on the creek’s surface. The sight has the appeal of the purely passive, like the racing of light under clouds on a field, the beautiful dream at the moment of being dreamed. The breeze is the merest puff, but you yourself sail headlong and breathless under the gale force of the spirit.
2
Seeing
When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always hid
the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.
It is still the first