Pilgrim at Tinker Creek | Books
“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a grounded narrative of the natural world, tied to philosophical, metaphysical insights. It’s a metaphysical nature book, a theodicy.
Reading it the second time around I feel is not yet enough to fully comprehend the brilliance, grandeur, and nuance of everything Annie Dillard presented within those pages. The ideas she presented, insights she plucked, and questions she dared ask. It’s a lot to take in.
Especially in the last chapter where she holds nothing back. All the big questions and ideas are revealed. Unveiled from the intricacies of the previous chapters. She goes right into the boundary where all the knowledge of our world, nature and human existence come to a halt, and probes, wide-eyed and keen-eyed, at who (or what) might be on the other side.
The other thing that I really admire about this book is its structure. On the surface, it’s structured like a conventional nature book, using the seasons to pace and divide the narrative. But there is a second dimension to how it was structured. In the book’s afterword, Dillard writes:
“…Neoplatonic Christianity described two routes to God: the via positiva and the via negativa. Philosophers on the via positiva assert that God is omnipotent, omniscient, etc; that God possesses all positive attributes. [the via negativa] stressed God’s unknowability. Anything we may say of God is untrue, as we can know only creaturely attributes, which do not apply to God…
The book’s first half, the via positiva, accumulates the world’s goodness and God’s. After an introductory chapter, the book begins with [the chapter] ‘Seeing’… and culminates in ‘Intricacy.’ A ‘Flood’ chapter washes all that away, and the second half of the book starts down the via negativa with [the chapter] ‘Fecundity,’ the dark side of intricacy. This half culminates in ‘Northing’, in which the visible world empties, leaf by leaf. ‘Northing’ is the counterpart to ‘Seeing.’ A concluding chapter keeps the bilateral symmetry.”
The nuance and intentionality of her structuring can also be found within the chapters themselves. In the chapter “The Present,” she talks about being in the present moment, a meditation in practice.
There’s a part in that chapter where she sits under a sycamore tree, and she contemplates. “I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek,” begins the paragraph. Then her mind wanders – now she’s describing ancient Rome where men honored the sycamore. Now she’s in Mt. Sinai with Moses. She talks about the practical immortality of sequoias.
And every few paragraphs she reels her mind back and begins with the sentence “I am sitting under a sycamore tree…” describing the sun’s heat and wind on her skin, the noise from the creek, and the “slivers of pressure from grass on my elbow’s skin.” She returns to her senses. Until the mind wanders again to conjure memories and imagination, to talk about the courage of children as a function of innocence, the subsoil world and all its tiny creatures just underneath where she sits… on the cool hard soil, under the sycamore tree.
That section of the chapter mirrors the mind in meditation. Or the mind at all times; that tug of war between our thoughts and the present. She writes, “I want to come at the subject of the present by showing how consciousness dashes and ambles around the labyrinthine tracks of the mind, returning again and again, however briefly, to the senses.”
Or in the chapter “Intricacy,” where in her first paragraph she describes the path it took for star light, both particle and wave, to angle into the continent, filter thru land dust, sift thru pine needles and leaves, and reach her kitchen window, passing thru a goldfish bowl where the “the goldfish’s side catches the light and bats it my way; I’ve an eyeful of fish-scale and star.”
That whole paragraph is a manifestation of intricacy itself.
She wrote it when she was just 27 years old. I am 26. Though I feel like I’m ages away from the breadth and depth of what she offered here. I wonder, will I ever be able to create something as grand? I feel like I can. Maybe. I think the process and path of any great undertaking is always blurred, but you only need to fix your sight on what or where it is you’re heading, and you’ll get there.
I am now heavily influenced by Dillard. I’ve been reading her book for about a year now. Her words are bold, beautiful, powerful and comforting all at the same time. Reading her prose and gaining her insights stirs up a wind from nowhere. It rises, lifts your spirit to new heights: you have gained a new perspective. And then some. If I can someday be called Dillard’s successor, as she was called Thoreau’s, that would be of the highest of praise.
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