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Product Details
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics (September 10, 2013)
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a strange book (I mean that in an entirely good, Pulitzer-prize winning sort of way). Your sense of nature around you will be not only sharpened but also simultaneously destroyed: Annie Dillard brings so much to your attention that any ordinary walk now seems like an adventure, filled with tiny events of huge importance that you are doubtless missing. This is a book about nature, and someone who loves nature and takes time to observe it.
This book is, at its core, not so much a book as a journal: a journal written by someone who has learned to see all of life in the small things. Rather than being disconnected essays, as some have claimed, this book is an entire, living story. Annie Dillard writes about seeing with a sense of urgency, as if when you blink the entire, elaborate picture will have vanished. There is an ambition in this book to feel.
You will be sucked in with no choice. There is no other writer who is so well able to tie tiny strands into a beautiful tapestry: especially when the tiny strands range from mountains to cicadas and locusts. This book is written in the revelry of experiencing creation bit by bit, leaf by leaf, muskrat by muskrat, mountain by mountain, galaxy by galaxy. But the writing is far from tedious. Rather, the sense of wonder — which you feel for an instant upon seeing something beautiful — is prolonged throughout the entire book.
The book is balanced in two halves: a Yin-Yang sort of perspective on the world. The author calls these the via positiva and the via negativa: two routes to seeing God in creation: one in the world’s grand intricacy and beauty, and the other in the raw power that kills billions of insects each year.Read more ›
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Five stars may be too many for this early volume in the Annie Dillard canon. It makes demands on the reader that are similar to those faced by a teacher reading a gifted student's term paper: The book is dazzling but it's also disorienting, like a travel adventure without a map. Still, it's a book that changes how the reader sees the world, and for that it gets highest marks.
This is a fairly easy book to read but a tough one to get through. It is simultaneously nature study, personal diary, Scripture commentary, mystical theology, field observation manual, and blank-verse poem. Annie Dillard was just age 27 when she wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and it is very much a young writer’s book, poetic and enthusiastic. Such strengths are also weaknesses: at times the poetry can be a bit ornate, and the multitude of facts can be daunting. Still, there are significant rewards in this book, if the reader, like a seasoned traveler, is willing to follow the author wherever she goes.
How far will we be going? The word “pilgrim” in the title suggests a long-distance trek to a holy place. But when we start the first chapter, we find Dillard already at a creekside cabin in Virginia , where she will stay for a year. If we’re to join her as pilgrims, we seem to at the destination without even setting out. Notice, though, that she calls her cabin an anchorite’s hermitage. Studying and writing by night, silently watching by day, she is more hermit than pilgrim. For Dillard and her readers, the journey in this book won’t be measured in miles. The road we’re on goes inward.
How strenuous is this going to be? Dillard answers this one with a story from Genesis, the one where Jacob wrestles with God on the bank of a stream. The contest goes on all night.Read more ›
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A huge water bug grabbed the end of a frog, injected a dissolving enzyme, sucked out the inside of the frog as Annie watched in horror, and left only a limp greenness floating on the surface of the water. Annie grabbed hold of Tinker Creek, sucked out the life from it, and left only a limp greenness floating on the surface of these pages. The stories she tells are not for the faint of heart.
[page 263] Downstream at the island's tip where the giant water bug clasped and ate the living frog, I sat and sucked at my own dry knuckles. It was the way that frog's eyes crumpled. His mouth was a gash of terror; the shining skin of his breast and shoulder shivered once and sagged, reduced to an empty purse; but oh those two snuffed eyes! They crinkled, the comprehension poured out of them as if sense and life had been a mere incidental addition to the idea of eyes, a filling like any jam in a jar that is soon and easily emptied; they flattened, lightless, opaque, and sank.
Annie paints vivid literary images of nature, at times serene, at times red in tooth and claw, many times, both. When her old fighting tom cat would jump through her open window in the middle of the night upon her sleeping body, she'd sometimes awaken to find herself covered with bloody paw prints. "I looked as though I'd been painted with roses." [page 1] Always her words flash like lightning across the page and strike deep, like an Indian's arrow plunging into the heart of game. She likens herself to such an arrow, its wooden shaft with "lightning marks," fissures carved along the shaft to allow blood to drip from the wound to provide a trail to the wounded game.Read more ›
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This item: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
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