Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
by Annie Dillard
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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley. Annie Dillard sets out to see what she can see. What she sees are astonishing incidents of "beauty tangled in a rapture with violence." Her personal narrative highlights one year's exploration on foot in the Virginia region through which Tinker Creek runs. In the summer, Dillard stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall, she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of show more 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. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
emydid Dillard was very much influenced by Thoreau (she did her master's thesis on Walden), and both Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Walden have similar narrative structures. Both books follow their narrator through the course of a year, and both weave detailed observations of the natural world together with self-examination and statements of a personal worldview. Annie Dillard's concerns are more explicitly theological, while Thoreau tends to be more concerned with the relationship between the individual and society - but both of their books are beautifully-written, densely symbolic investigations into the relationship between the self, nature, and the spiritual. It's interesting to think about the links and contrasts between the two books - for example, between Dillard's idea of "seeing" and Thoreau's reflections on self-exploration and awareness.
30
bezoar44 These authors share some of the same fearless introspection; and while both study the natural world, it is in some ways just a (vital) context in which to explore what it means to live meaningfully.
danhammang Love of the land, celebration of the natural world written by one of the finest authors of this generation.
Member Reviews
[Update (2020-05-04): You know what? I'm going to go ahead and raise this to 5 stars. I know I'm going to re-read this. It sticks with me to this day. So why wait?]
"Exuberant." "Extravagant." All through this book, I've been searching for the right adjective to describe Dillard's prose. I'm still not satisfied that I've found it. There is much here to treasure: heart-wrenching anecdotes; natural curiosities related as friend-to-friend; deep philosophical and spiritual issues probed. One thing I liked is that the book is entirely observational; as in, "here are things I've seen and my thoughts about them". It is never polemical; Dillard never tries to convince you there is a Creator. She just relates her thoughts, which implicitly show more include that idea.
It is perhaps worth noting that Dillard was 27 when she wrote Pilgrim. So it is very much a young author's book. Hence the exuberance, I suppose. Some may find that off-putting. But I found it refreshing.
I listened to the Audible audiobook version, read by Tavia Gilbert. I strongly suspect I enjoyed the book much more that way than I would have coming to it by text alone. Some writers' voices beg to be heard, not just read. So I strongly encourage newcomers to Tinker's Creek to go the audio route. But that said, before I was half-way done, I had ordered a hardcopy version that I could mark up and highlight favorite passages. show less
"Exuberant." "Extravagant." All through this book, I've been searching for the right adjective to describe Dillard's prose. I'm still not satisfied that I've found it. There is much here to treasure: heart-wrenching anecdotes; natural curiosities related as friend-to-friend; deep philosophical and spiritual issues probed. One thing I liked is that the book is entirely observational; as in, "here are things I've seen and my thoughts about them". It is never polemical; Dillard never tries to convince you there is a Creator. She just relates her thoughts, which implicitly show more include that idea.
It is perhaps worth noting that Dillard was 27 when she wrote Pilgrim. So it is very much a young author's book. Hence the exuberance, I suppose. Some may find that off-putting. But I found it refreshing.
I listened to the Audible audiobook version, read by Tavia Gilbert. I strongly suspect I enjoyed the book much more that way than I would have coming to it by text alone. Some writers' voices beg to be heard, not just read. So I strongly encourage newcomers to Tinker's Creek to go the audio route. But that said, before I was half-way done, I had ordered a hardcopy version that I could mark up and highlight favorite passages. show less
I’d advise reading the afterward before; there’s no plot to spoil, and the brief summary of why and how is a helpful scaffold. This is not a book of independent essays, but it didn’t read to me as a unified whole either. Annie Dillard describes it as a “theodicy”, split into via positiva and via negativa. Also it progresses through the calendar year. It entwines acute observations of nature with gleanings from scientific reading and cosmic consciousness with a dose of naval gazing. And somehow Eskimos got in there. The result is not entirely coherent, IMO, but then I don’t place a high value on “lyrical” (a frequent adjective of praise) unless it is about something, and lyrical morphs into flamboyant a bit too often for show more my taste. It is about something sometimes though (and the other times may be my failure to perceive), when she sticks to the task at hand for several paragraphs straight, and then the lyrical writing is impressive and inspirational, especially so since she was a mere 27 years old at the time.
And after writing the paragraph above, I revisited passages that stood out for others in a group read, and saw depth and complexity that I had passed by. I was, I think, expecting a different sort of book, and didn’t fully make the mental adjustment while I was reading. Maybe this is a book best read slowly with pauses.
She begins with an introductory “I am an explorer” and a chapter on seeing, heavily reliant on Marius von Senden (Space and Sight), about the formerly blind making sense of color patches. Anecdotes are extracted from (among others) R. R. Askew, Jean-Henri Fabre, Edwin Way Teal (The Strange Lives of Familiar Insects), Rutherford Platt (The Great American Forest). I note these authors because I (or you) may want to read the originals.
She observes muskrats, starlings, snakes, frogs, fish, praying mantises, caddisflies, caterpillars, sycamores... learning what to look for and how to watch undetected, fascinated by critterly behavior on its own merits, and for what it may say about a “creator”. Whether this is metaphor or abstraction or religion is not clear (and I can’t draw precise borders around the words anyway). It is language that I, an apatheist, was comfortable enough with, as an effort to get at an ineffable essence beyond nuts-and-bolts nature, but it infuses the text; this is not the sort of treatise that gets an index. Nature is “intricate”, “extravagant”, “exuberant”, “profligate”, “fecund”; decidedly not efficient. If you want science, if you want to know that a caterpillar’s head has 28 muscles, that a locust is not simply a type of grasshopper but rather a form that occurs under crowded conditions, that the molecules of chlorophyll and hemoglobin differ only by one atom at the center, grab the fact as it flits by because you may not find it again. show less
And after writing the paragraph above, I revisited passages that stood out for others in a group read, and saw depth and complexity that I had passed by. I was, I think, expecting a different sort of book, and didn’t fully make the mental adjustment while I was reading. Maybe this is a book best read slowly with pauses.
She begins with an introductory “I am an explorer” and a chapter on seeing, heavily reliant on Marius von Senden (Space and Sight), about the formerly blind making sense of color patches. Anecdotes are extracted from (among others) R. R. Askew, Jean-Henri Fabre, Edwin Way Teal (The Strange Lives of Familiar Insects), Rutherford Platt (The Great American Forest). I note these authors because I (or you) may want to read the originals.
She observes muskrats, starlings, snakes, frogs, fish, praying mantises, caddisflies, caterpillars, sycamores... learning what to look for and how to watch undetected, fascinated by critterly behavior on its own merits, and for what it may say about a “creator”. Whether this is metaphor or abstraction or religion is not clear (and I can’t draw precise borders around the words anyway). It is language that I, an apatheist, was comfortable enough with, as an effort to get at an ineffable essence beyond nuts-and-bolts nature, but it infuses the text; this is not the sort of treatise that gets an index. Nature is “intricate”, “extravagant”, “exuberant”, “profligate”, “fecund”; decidedly not efficient. If you want science, if you want to know that a caterpillar’s head has 28 muscles, that a locust is not simply a type of grasshopper but rather a form that occurs under crowded conditions, that the molecules of chlorophyll and hemoglobin differ only by one atom at the center, grab the fact as it flits by because you may not find it again. show less
This stands apart from most other memoirs I’ve read—Dillard isn’t just detailing her experience, as though that were enough to make a meaningful read. The experiences matter, obviously, but this book is at its best when she slows nearly to a stop—observing with breathless stillness, her mind lingering and pressing deeper, so that a moment with a cedar tree or a muskrat or a praying mantis becomes something larger, more complex, more profound.
It’s really the combination of memoir, nature journal, spiritual meditation and philosophical essay that makes the book work for me. I’m never going to be interested in yet another alone-in-the-beauty-of-nature memoir, and at the same time this is something richer than spiritual or show more philosophical rumination. Dillard’s meditations are deeply rooted. They exist in time, and even more so in place. They grow from exquisitely detailed observation, from intimate awareness. Further, she has a real ability to sit with the world, to give it the kind of sustained attention that has always been really rare, but that returns so much value. I loved her concept of seeing as a pearl that “may be found, [but] may not be sought.” Or again later, “You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.” She doesn’t make mindfulness sound easy, by any means, but she makes it look intensely rewarding.
I don’t want to just gush, though—it’s not as though nothing bothered me about the book. There are times—lots of times—when the prose just sounds so heavily worked, so wrought that I couldn’t bear it. “The past inserts a finger into a slit in the skin of the present, and pulls.” Really? She allows herself to run with her ideas, and there were moments when she might have reined it in a bit.
Then too, and more significantly, as much as I appreciate her approach to the natural world, I was also persistently aware of the immense privilege that underlay it. The ability to sit so patiently, so consistently over time, with so much solitude and so little real want—that isn’t an experience most people ever have access to, no matter how much they might appreciate it or benefit from it. She doesn’t waste it, I’ll grant, but neither does she ever express any awareness of it.
In the end, I’m able to overlook those qualms, because the book has so much else to offer. There is an intimacy, a vulnerable receptivity, and a substantive beauty in this book that I do not take for granted. show less
It’s really the combination of memoir, nature journal, spiritual meditation and philosophical essay that makes the book work for me. I’m never going to be interested in yet another alone-in-the-beauty-of-nature memoir, and at the same time this is something richer than spiritual or show more philosophical rumination. Dillard’s meditations are deeply rooted. They exist in time, and even more so in place. They grow from exquisitely detailed observation, from intimate awareness. Further, she has a real ability to sit with the world, to give it the kind of sustained attention that has always been really rare, but that returns so much value. I loved her concept of seeing as a pearl that “may be found, [but] may not be sought.” Or again later, “You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.” She doesn’t make mindfulness sound easy, by any means, but she makes it look intensely rewarding.
I don’t want to just gush, though—it’s not as though nothing bothered me about the book. There are times—lots of times—when the prose just sounds so heavily worked, so wrought that I couldn’t bear it. “The past inserts a finger into a slit in the skin of the present, and pulls.” Really? She allows herself to run with her ideas, and there were moments when she might have reined it in a bit.
Then too, and more significantly, as much as I appreciate her approach to the natural world, I was also persistently aware of the immense privilege that underlay it. The ability to sit so patiently, so consistently over time, with so much solitude and so little real want—that isn’t an experience most people ever have access to, no matter how much they might appreciate it or benefit from it. She doesn’t waste it, I’ll grant, but neither does she ever express any awareness of it.
In the end, I’m able to overlook those qualms, because the book has so much else to offer. There is an intimacy, a vulnerable receptivity, and a substantive beauty in this book that I do not take for granted. show less
Overwritten, 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 show more 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. show less
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 show more 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. show less
"Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery" (p.145)
This book is so good.
I feel a little bit less like an atheist the more Dillard that I read. It's not that her books are particularly religious. They do reference the Bible and a christian god, but just as often reference the Koran, the Bagavad Gita, and other religious traditions. But then, a sentence later, she is deep into source materials on botany, entomology, and scientific method. Her books, this one in particular, are more about spirituality and mystery and wonderment and the ways that we attempt to get closer to that. She is trying to find the divine in the everyday: the growth of a sycamore, the flood waters of a mountain creek, a toad, parasitic wasps.
The thread show more through this book for me is about the joys of learning and applying new ways of seeing and learning about the world and one's place in it but also the joy in hitting a dead end with those means of knowing. There is joy and beauty in the impenetrable mystery of the world. There is a joy of not knowing and of being overwhelmed by and present with something that cannot be understood.
There is a remarkable passage about 1/3 of the way through the book where Dillard is talking about Thoreau (I think) and she is either commenting on or quoting from Thoreau that the quality that holds humanity back from the divine is self-consciousness. Literally that, consciousness that is bounded by the self. The self as the stick against which all things are measured. There is self and there is not-self. But the world is alive with creatures of all kinds that have their own consciousness, ways of being in and getting along in the world. And these consciousnesses, ours included, bump up against one another. And in some of those instances, consciousnesses are extensions of one another. What is it like, I think Dillard is asking, if our consciousness is not bounded by the skin but extends to other things? I'm reminded of Bateson's discussion of the blind person and the cane, asking whether consciousness extends to the tip of the cane or stops where the cane meets the person's hand.
The book feels like a collection of essays, but it isn't really. It's an argument and the prose by which it is delivered is some of the best. show less
This book is so good.
I feel a little bit less like an atheist the more Dillard that I read. It's not that her books are particularly religious. They do reference the Bible and a christian god, but just as often reference the Koran, the Bagavad Gita, and other religious traditions. But then, a sentence later, she is deep into source materials on botany, entomology, and scientific method. Her books, this one in particular, are more about spirituality and mystery and wonderment and the ways that we attempt to get closer to that. She is trying to find the divine in the everyday: the growth of a sycamore, the flood waters of a mountain creek, a toad, parasitic wasps.
The thread show more through this book for me is about the joys of learning and applying new ways of seeing and learning about the world and one's place in it but also the joy in hitting a dead end with those means of knowing. There is joy and beauty in the impenetrable mystery of the world. There is a joy of not knowing and of being overwhelmed by and present with something that cannot be understood.
There is a remarkable passage about 1/3 of the way through the book where Dillard is talking about Thoreau (I think) and she is either commenting on or quoting from Thoreau that the quality that holds humanity back from the divine is self-consciousness. Literally that, consciousness that is bounded by the self. The self as the stick against which all things are measured. There is self and there is not-self. But the world is alive with creatures of all kinds that have their own consciousness, ways of being in and getting along in the world. And these consciousnesses, ours included, bump up against one another. And in some of those instances, consciousnesses are extensions of one another. What is it like, I think Dillard is asking, if our consciousness is not bounded by the skin but extends to other things? I'm reminded of Bateson's discussion of the blind person and the cane, asking whether consciousness extends to the tip of the cane or stops where the cane meets the person's hand.
The book feels like a collection of essays, but it isn't really. It's an argument and the prose by which it is delivered is some of the best. show less
It 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 show more the eyes of Ms. Dillard, it is a delight and a wonder. show less
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 show more the eyes of Ms. Dillard, it is a delight and a wonder. show less
Annie Dillard describes a year spent exploring the creek and forest near her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her observations of nature lead to contemplation of the nature of God and creation. The book starts by celebrating the abundance and extravagance of nature, but then turns to examining the amount of death and waste, such as egg-laying insect who create hundreds of thousands of eggs but only a few survive. Nature can be beautiful, but also very cruel.
I think I will forever be haunted by the final pages of the book. After spending so much time discussing the cruelty of nature, there is one paragraph at the very end that flips that cruelty on its head, and makes the abundance of death in nature into a sign of God's care for show more creation.
This is a book worth discussing and re-reading. There's a lot to unpack in it. Sometimes it feels like she's just rambling about whatever happens to be going through her mind, and then, seemingly out of the blue, one small sentence will tie it all together, often with a big punch.
Dillard's afterword notes that the book suffers from some of the arrogance of her youth: parts of it are definitely over-written, but they are still enjoyable. She certainly had wisdom and humility beyond her years, but I wonder how different the book would be if she had written it when she was older. show less
I think I will forever be haunted by the final pages of the book. After spending so much time discussing the cruelty of nature, there is one paragraph at the very end that flips that cruelty on its head, and makes the abundance of death in nature into a sign of God's care for show more creation.
This is a book worth discussing and re-reading. There's a lot to unpack in it. Sometimes it feels like she's just rambling about whatever happens to be going through her mind, and then, seemingly out of the blue, one small sentence will tie it all together, often with a big punch.
Dillard's afterword notes that the book suffers from some of the arrogance of her youth: parts of it are definitely over-written, but they are still enjoyable. She certainly had wisdom and humility beyond her years, but I wonder how different the book would be if she had written it when she was older. show less
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Group Read- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard in 75 Books Challenge for 2014 (February 2014)
Author Information
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Annie Dillard was born Annie Doak in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on April 30, 1945. She received a B.A and an M.A. in English from Hollins College. She writes both fiction and nonfiction books including Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk, The Living, and Mornings Like This: Found Poems. She won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize show more for General Nonfiction for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She wrote an autobiography entitled An American Childhood. Her work also has appeared in such periodicals as The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and Cosmopolitan. She taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1974
- Epigraph
- It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.
---Heraclitus - Dedication
- for Richard
- First words
- 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.
[Afterword] In October, 1972, camping in Acadia National Park on the Maine coast, I read a nature book.
[More Years Afterword] I was twenty-seven in 1972 when I began writing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. - Quotations
- Not only does something come if you wait, but it pours over you like a waterfall, a tidal wave. You wait in all naturalness without expectation or hope, emptied, translucent, and that which comes rocks and topples you; it wil... (show all)l shear, loose, launch, winnow, grind.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)And like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says "Glory," and my right foot says "Amen": in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)[Afterword] And consequently a generation of youth has grown up cursing my name--which, you recall, I didn't want to use in the first place. --Annie Dillard, 1999
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)[More Years Afterword] (I knew this happened; I did not know I was already that old.) --2007 - Blurbers
- Barkham, John
- Original language*
- Engels
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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