Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by annie dillard

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

This book didn't merely change my outlook. Instead, it provided words for the feelings that I had harbored for many years yet had never been able to express clearly. It's somewhat like Walden, but with the difference that if Thoreau had a passion for strange nature facts and wasn't so unbearably boring or arrogant half the time.

It describes Dillard's time living in the mountains of VA when she was approximately 27 (which I dislike). It is told through a series of remarkable vignettes, each grouped under perceptive thematic headings. It presents a ceaseless parade of the horror, fear, and intricate beauty of the world.

The funny thing is that I have taught this book twice already. The first time was amazing; the students understood it, and that unit truly strengthened my connection with that class. This year, I taught it again to a few students. There is an expression in Chinese, "dui niu tan qin," which roughly means "playing the piano for the cows." That's precisely what it was like this time, and it completely devastated me. They didn't understand it at all. It is a terrible thing to have such intense passion for an idea and want to communicate it to others, only to have them see only a faint outline. Dillard even mentions in the introduction that she doesn't think this book should be taught to high schoolers, so perhaps I was just fortunate the first time. But I encourage all of you intelligent people to read this one. It will have a profound impact on you, and it's one of those books that you can pick up at any point after reading it and still discover something new.

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Spocktopus

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

This book has been on my to-read list since 2015. It was recommended to me by a library patron. I was anticipating a gentle book about nature. But in reality, nature is not gentle at all; it is about adaptation and survival.

Frankly speaking, some of the passages seemed more like those from a horror novel to me. For example, the description of the silver eels crossing the field! Listening to it in the middle of the night in the dark, due to another bout of insomnia, added an extra element to my fear. Consider this:

"On cool autumn nights eels hurrying to the sea sometimes crawl for a mile or more across dewy meadows to reach streams that will carry them to salt water."

"There are too many to count, all you see is a silver slither like twisted ropes of water falling roughly. A one-way milling and mingling over the meadow and slide to the creek. Silver eels in the night are barely made out seething as far as you can squint. A squirming jostling torrent of silver eels in the grass."

Never in a million years would I have imagined that eels could travel across meadows. I am truly glad that I have never come across such a sight!

Then there were the multitudes of grasshoppers, which seemed a bit like a plague of locusts:

"The aired burst and whirred. There were grasshoppers of all sizes, grasshoppers yellow green and black, short horned, and long horned, slant faced, band winged, spur throated, cone headed, pygmy, spotted, striped and barred. They sprang in salvos, dropped in the air."

Finally, there is the fatalistic view of life going on and how truly replaceable we are:

"All the individual people I understood with special clarity were living at that very moment with great emotion in intricate detail in their individual times and places and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people one by one like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped in a never-ending cloth."

Overall, this is a book that left me unexpectedly breathless. It presents a side of nature that I had never before considered, filled with both beauty and horror, and makes me reflect on the delicate balance of life.

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blueisthemoon

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

You might initially think Annie Dillard is simply discussing parasitic wasps, but then suddenly, WHAM! She veers into talking about God or humanity. That's precisely what the reading experience of this book is like.

She documents an entire year at Tinker Creek in Virginia, observing and reflecting in a manner unique to her.

Comparing this book to "Holy the Firm," I suspect Dillard views herself as a bit of a recluse. She specifically mentions that while penning this work, she is perusing the Apophthegmata. I believe I'm coming to understand that it's her way of confining herself to a small space - a writing room, a creek - that enables her to perceive more within it than others might.

Near the conclusion, she instructs the reader:

"Ezekiel castigates false prophets as those who have 'not gone up into the gaps.' The gaps are the essence. The gaps are the spirit's sole abode, the altitudes and latitudes so astonishingly uncluttered and pure that the spirit can first discover itself, like a once-blind man set free. The gaps are the crevices in the rock where you cower to catch a glimpse of the backside of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells through which the wind pierces, the frigid, narrowing fjords that split the cliffs of mystery. Ascend into the gaps. If you can locate them; for they shift and disappear too. Hunt the gaps. Slip into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock - more than a maple - a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you."

That essentially encapsulates what she does throughout the book - with every snake, every tree, every egg sac. I have a much deeper path to traverse for my own study, but I don't wish to overly burden this review.

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illusion123chan

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

I am not a re-reader, and yet, to my astonishment, I found myself thinking that if I weren't reading for a challenge, I would immediately go back to the beginning and read this one again. I truly don't know why this book struck such a chord with me. I am at best a very casual observer of nature. There is a tree just off my deck that every year I marvel at how beautiful it is when it comes into leaf. This year, I decided to take a picture of it daily as it unfolds. I also feed the birds and enjoy watching them squabble over the abundance. I know there are at least 4 different kinds of slugs in my yard.

Annie Dillard, on the other hand, is not a casual observer of nature. She spends hours stalking, waiting, and watching. I marked only a few places in the book, but I might have marked dozens. Her delight at seeing something she has never seen before is simply infectious. In one chapter, she tells how she spent years knowing of the existence of muskrats but had never seen one. Suddenly, one appeared, and she stalked it. Of course, the muskrat knew she was there and quickly and quietly disappeared. Now that she knew where they were, she learned more patience. In essence, she played hard to get. But that first time? "I felt a rush of such pure energy I thought I would not need to breathe for days."

In addition to observing nature, Dillard has obviously read extensively. I wondered at her catalog of quotes she must maintain and even how she had it organized. She has managed over the years to collect some facts, which are sprinkled here and there. I didn't find them boring. She is also fascinated with other cultures that live close to nature, often referencing Alaskan Eskimos. "Alaskan Eskimos believe in many souls. An individual soul has a series of afterlives, returning again and again to earth, but only rarely as a human. 'Since its appearances as a human being are rare, it is thought a great privilege to be here as we are, with human companions who also, in this reincarnation, are privileged and therefore greatly to be respected.' To be here as we are." I was privileged to have been able to read this. Dillard's enthusiasm for just being alive is contagious. What marvels might I see today? I can hardly wait.

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chiapet-IRL

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

Pilgrimage to Tinker Creek is not the literal translation of this remarkable essay that won Annie Dillard the Pulitzer in 1975. The original title is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and the difference might not be insignificant.

Focusing on the "pilgrimage" means highlighting the journey, which is planned, with known intermediate stages and the final destination. One walks, struggles, but follows familiar and well-trodden paths.

Annie Dillard does none of this in the vicinity of Tinker Creek, in a valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, where she lived in the early seventies when she wrote the book. She does not make any canonical pilgrimage and yet reveals herself in her condition as a pilgrim.

She moves from one bank of the river to the other, visits forests and meadows, tear-shaped islets and abandoned cottages, climbs on bridges and fallen sycamore trunks, stops among bushes and rests on flat sandstone rocks or carpets of dry leaves.

I imagine her as a kind of Sir David Attenborough lost in the mountain forests, perhaps dressed, as he always was in the BBC documentaries, in khaki pants and a blue shirt, something that gave me an unfounded anxiety when he plunged into the mud of some swamp to collect a rare specimen of a spotted amphibian, getting all muddy to the point that I was led to think that for the next scenes he would have had to wear reserve clothes (how many khaki pants did he carry with him? how many blue shirts?).

However, Annie Dillard does not limit herself to delighting us with detailed descriptions of what she encounters, whether it is a water shrew swimming dorsal in the river, a coiled snake skin or a stalk of grass adorned with mantis oothecae ready to open, but she allows herself to be carried away, and us with her, towards vast and profound meditations on nature and the created (often Dillard evokes an inscrutable "creator" and after all what moves the pilgrim if not the religious longing?). She feels the need to immerse herself in it, abandoning human moral categories, which are meaningless and useless when, for example, examining the fractal cycle of parasites nested inside other parasites and so on up to the fifth degree of parasitism ("How can one understand such a thing?", "What kind of tithe do we pay to the devil?"). One must agitate without rest like subatomic particles not to lose the beauty that surrounds us everywhere, the mystery of life hidden in every corner, a mystery, I would add, capable of revealing itself regardless of novels and perhaps artificial consciousness-raising about ecology, of which there is no trace in these pages.

The "pilgrim" of the original title, then, does not describe the condition of someone who moves towards a known destination, but of someone who knows that one can never be too curious to look and that we should make our own the very nature of the rivers: "Theirs is the mystery of permanent creation and of all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of what is immutable, the dissolution of the present, the complexity of beauty, the urgency of fecundity, the elusiveness of what is free and the defective nature of perfection."

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Asife77

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

Library.

I'm really having a tough time deciding what rating to give this book. One of the young married ladies from church recommended it to me. At first, I really struggled with it. In the beginning, the writing seemed pretentious to me, and I almost gave up. However, the Wikipedia article about "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" really helped me decide to continue reading. The Pilgrim in the book was very interested in observing nature, but although I've become more interested in nature in recent years, I'm not usually that into it. The subject matter didn't really appeal to me and sometimes it felt a bit dragging. The author focuses a lot on death in nature, and there were whole days when I just couldn't bring myself to read the book.

But in the end, I finished it. And I'm glad I did. It's not just because I'm done with it, but because Dillard had some profound things to say about life, death, faith, and existence. It all came together nicely in the end. I understand why some readers absolutely love the writing. There were certain portions that I found really strikingly beautiful. But I also understand why some readers find it extremely boring. She really stretches her vocabulary to the limit. At times, I think she's overwriting, using big words just for the sake of using big words. But at other times, it's actually quite worthwhile. The book is a bit dated in some parts, like the mention of the flood from Hurricane Agnes in the 1970s, but it's not so dated that the reader would be confused. It still manages to talk about issues of being and nature in a somewhat roundabout way.

I've come to the conclusion that this book, more than most, gets better with multiple readings. Maybe it even requires multiple readings. Each time I skimmed back through the parts I've marked, I found more depth and understanding in the text. Brandy asked me if she should look for a copy. I'm really at a loss for what to tell her. The library was a great way for me to try it out. I can imagine wanting to go back and read it again sometime, at least skimming through it. I posted some quotes from the book on my blog. I still don't know how many stars to give it. I can't say that I liked the book, but objectively speaking, it was well written. I'm not disappointed that I read it. It was an accomplishment of determination to finish it. Overall, I think it was well worth my time and effort, and it might be again in the future. It will never be my favorite book, but I do appreciate it. I might even give some of her other books a try.

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Jaegerbombbaby

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

This is some of the most gorgeous writing I've ever read.

The book doesn't present a simpering, sentimental view of the natural world. Instead, it offers a majestic and often harsh exploration, delving into the difficulties and discomforts that we usually shy away from.

It has been a while since I last read true creative nonfiction, and it took my brain a moment to adjust to Dillard's style. Her prose is searching, inquisitive, wild, and as rich as nature itself. However, sometimes the way she writes can be rather confusing, making you look twice.

Have you ever listened to a person who struggles to express their point clearly in words, yet you still understand what they mean deep down? That's how I felt for a significant part of this book.

If possible, read it outside. It's a wild thing too.

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LilPrinceein

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

July 15,2025

I reached page 70 of Dillard's work, and I simply couldn't endure any more of what I perceived as her masturbatory nature writing.

Her descriptions seemed overly indulgent and self-absorbed, lacking the depth and objectivity that I had hoped for.

It felt as if she was more concerned with her own subjective experience and emotions rather than presenting a balanced and engaging account of nature.

The constant stream of personal musings and exaggerated language began to wear on me, making it difficult for me to fully immerse myself in the supposed beauty and wonder of the natural world she was attempting to convey.

I found myself skimming through the pages, hoping to find something more substantial and meaningful, but alas, it seemed that her writing style was not to my taste.

Perhaps others may appreciate her unique approach, but for me, it was a rather disappointing read.

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