If the concept of someone quietly reflecting and writing in vivid detail in poetic prose about nature sounds magnificent, then this story might hold great appeal for you. I had the impression that I could be that kind of person, but this book has proven otherwise. I should have recognized this by now, yet sometimes it is crucial to read something that makes you aware of your own aversions. For me, that remains poetry. I remember being compelled to read poetry in high school, and it all seemed like nonsense. “Why can't they just say they died, or it's awful to lose your love?” I thought, without being so overly flowery. As my eyes became crossed from attempting to decipher what on earth the meaning was, I would lose focus and think about anything other than the lesson, intensifying my misery and loathing. I felt much the same when reading this work. It has so many positive aspects: amazing insights, beautiful imagery, a recitation on what it means to inhabit this incredible world, and a copious number of facts about Eskimos (Inuit). And yet, I would struggle to read 15 or so pages when answering nature's call in the morning and scarcely give it a second look for the rest of the day.

The premise of the book, a youngish woman observing her local environment (Tinker Creek, VA) and taking note of its and her place in the universe, is a powerful one. Annie Tyler's observations are sharp and detailed – sometimes to an excessive extent. I could have done without learning the lifecycles of seemingly every creature in the biome. She takes great delight in showing the complexity and worthwhileness of both small and large critters in a respectful manner. Whether it is celebrating the simple joy of watching muskrats in statue-like silence or vividly detailing the birth process of a mantis, a veritable smorgasbord of nature is presented.

Although she has a great and profound respect for the nature surrounding her, she is under no illusion that it can be tamed or appeased. The natural world is not meant to be controlled. Whether it is the cresting of the rivers and tributaries that cause flooding and change the very composition of the surrounding areas or depictions of lice gorging themselves on countless creatures, life and death are intertwined. To her credit, it is not always portrayed as a case of struggle, but rather a case of evolutionary chaos. She uses the example of aphids which release millions of eggs with only a few surviving to adulthood.

I truly wanted to enjoy this work, but unfortunately, there was a disconnect. In this instance, I did not feel the spiritual communion that this book so eloquently posits. Maybe it is the wrong time of year, or perhaps this is just the type of work that will never resonate with me. It is one of those books that someone gives 5 stars, and I am immediately envious of them because it feels like they have an understanding that I will never possess, a secret to which I am not privy. Setting aside that pity party, for me, it is a 2-star read.

I truly wanted to have a liking for this book. However, I ended up finding it extremely boring to the extent that it was aggravating.

Dillard writes about nature with a sense of wonder and awe. These are sentiments that, in theory, I wholeheartedly agree with. But the problem is that I simply don't have the patience to listen to someone continuously ramble on and on about it for a whopping six hours.

It seems that while the subject matter might be interesting in concept, the execution of presenting it in such a drawn-out manner makes it a tiresome experience. I was hoping for a more engaging and concise exploration of nature's beauty and mysteries. Instead, I was left feeling frustrated and unfulfilled by the end of it.

Perhaps if the author had found a more captivating way to convey their thoughts and ideas, I might have had a different opinion. But as it stands, this book failed to hold my attention and left me with a rather negative impression.

This is my favorite book of all time, and I return to it over and over again to be inspired, like a religious book. It taught me how to see, how to look, how to find holy places.

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 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 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 are a passive mystery, the oldest of them all. Theirs is the 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.

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?

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 up 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, there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.

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? 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.

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 I could see was the other side of the mountain: more of the same. 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 dizzyingly lead.

I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. 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 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 risk getting stuck on the board, so to speak, unable to move in any direction, which happens enough; 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 watch the running sheets of light raised on the creek 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.

A cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if turned on by a switch; its reflection just as suddenly materialized on the water upstream, flat and floating, so that I couldn’t see the creek bottom, or life in the water under the cloud. Downstream, away from the cloud on the water, water turtles smooth as beans were gliding down with the current. I didn’t know whether to trace the progress of one turtle…or scan the mud bank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trailed it after them….But shadows spread, and deepened, and stayed. Things were going on. I couldn’t see whether that sere rustle I heard was a distant rattlesnake, slit-eyed, or a nearby sparrow kicking at debris….Tremendous action roiled the water everywhere I looked, big action, inexplicable… At last I stared upstream where only the deepest violet remained of the cloud, a cloud so high its underbelly still glowed feeble color from a hidden sky lighted in turn by sun halfway to China. And out of that violet, a sudden enormous black body arced over the water. I saw only a cylindrical sleekness. Head and tail, if there was a head and tail, were both submerged in a cloud. I saw only one ebony fling, a headlong dive to darkness; then the waters closed and the lights went out.

I walked home in a shivering daze, up hill and down. Later I lay open-mouthed in bed, my arms flung wide at my sides to steady the whirling darkness. At this latitude I’m spinning 836 miles an hour round the earth’s axis; I often fancy I feel my sweeping fall as a breakneck arc like the dive of dolphins, and the hollow rushing of wind raises hair on my neck and the side of my face. In orbit around the sun I’m moving 64,800 miles an hour. The solar system as a whole, like a merry-go-round unhinged, spins, bobs, and blinks at the speed of 43,200 miles along a course set east of Hercules. Someone has piped, and we are dancing a tarantella until the sweat pours. I open my eyes and I see dark, muscled forms curl out of water, with flapping gills and flattened eyes. I close my eyes and I see stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper stars bowing to deepest stars at the crown on an infinite cone.

In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss. They’re out there showering down, committing hari-kiri in a flame of fatal attraction, and hissing perhaps into the ocean. But at dawn what looks like a blue dome clamps down over me like a lid on a pot. The stars and planets could smash and I’d never know. Only a piece of ashen moon occasionally climbs up or down the inside of the dome, and our local star without surcease explodes on our heads. We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet sees aware of that strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever.

Oh, it’s mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. It’s one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I can’t see. Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small. No culture explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are not seeing something. Galileo thought that comets were an optical illusion. This is fertile ground: since we are certain that they’re not, we can look at what scientists are saying with fresh hope. What if there are really gleaming castellated cities hung upside-down over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger.

Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it. It is, as Ruskin says, “not merely unnoticed, but in the full clear sense of the word, unseen.” If Tinker Mountain erupted, I’d be likely to notice. But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present….when I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; the study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head. Some days when the mist covers the mountains, when the muskrats won’t show and the microscope’s mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife, claw a rent in the top, peep, and if I must, fall.

But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut.

It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the muddy bottom…again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second and flash! the sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn’t watch for it. It was always just happening somewhere else…so I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up like the world’s turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone.

When I see this way, I see truly.

It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.

The woods are acres of sticks: I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall, the striptease is over; things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open.

Yesterday I watched a curious nightfall. The cloud ceiling took on a warm tone, deepened, and departed as if drawn on a leash. I could no longer see the fat snow flying against the sky; I could see it only as it fell before dark objects. Any object at a distance – like the dead, ivy-covered walnut I see from the bay window - looked like a black and white frontispiece seen through a sheet of white tissue. It was like dying, this watching the world recede into deeper and deeper blues while the snow piled; silence swelled and extended, distance dissolved, and soon only concentration at the largest shadows let me make out the movement of falling snow, and that too failed. The snow on the yard was blue as ink, faintly luminous; the sky violet. The bay window betrayed me, and started giving me back the room’s lamps. It was like dying, that growing dimmer and deeper and then going out.

The remarkable about the world of insects, however, is precisely that there is no veil cast over these horrors. These are mysteries performed in broad daylight before our very eyes; we can see every detail, and yet they are still mysteries. If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither “declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs,” then clearly I had better be scrying the signs. The earth devotes an overwhelming proportion of its energy to these buzzings and leaps in the grass. Theirs is the biggest wedge of the pie: Why? I ought to keep a giant water bug in an aquarium on my dresser, so I can think about it.

Nature is, above all, profligate. Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once. This is what the sign of the insects says. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too grotesque. If you’re dealing with organic compounds, then let them combine. If it works, if it quickens, set it clacking on the grass; there’s always room for one more; you ain’t so handsome yourself. This is a spendthrift economy; thought nothing is lost, all is spent.

The fixed is the world without fire - dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark. It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread. Last spring in the flood I saw a brown cattail bob in the high muddy water, up and down, side to side, a jerk a second. I went back the next day and nothing had changed; that empty twitching beat on in an endless, sickening tattoo. What geomancy reads what the wind-blown sand writes on the desert rock? I read there that all things live by a generous power and dance to a might tune; or I read there that all things are scattered and hurled, that our every arabesque and grand jete is a frantic variation of our one free fall…

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish to know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. So many things have been shown on these banks, so much light has illumined me by reflection here where the water comes down, that I can hardly believe that this grace never flags, that the pouring from ever-renewable sources is endless, impartial, and free.

Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant election that split showed a forest, swaying?

I

Early on in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard describes her intent. She proposes to keep what Thoreau called “a meteorological journal of the mind.” She will tell tales and describe the sights of the tamed valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. She will also explore, in fear and trembling, the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses. This sentence is typical of Dillard’s extraordinary prose. It points not only to Thoreau’s immersion in the natural world but also to St. Paul’s exhortation. As much as one might compare Dillard to Thoreau, it’s the biblical reference that gets us closer to her purpose. The title suggests she is a pilgrim in pursuit of the divine in nature and beyond.

Dillard’s pursuit is not straightforward. She sees creation as intricately layered and kaleidoscopic. Tinker Creek represents nature’s abundance and elusiveness. In contrast, mountains are more accessible. They offer her some grounding in a world in motion. She comments that “the creeks are the world with all the stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.”

In the book, Dillard characterizes her quest as stalking. She believes she has to catch the natural world unawares. She trains herself to see directly, void of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness hinders the experience of the present. She writes that “you have to stalk everything.”

Dillard not only wants to see the wondrous but to be consumed by it. Stalking recalls Flannery O’Connor. Their quests took different paths, but they share a commitment to their spiritual quests. Both eschew “easy faith.” Dillard may find comfort in nature, but that’s not why she’s there. She writes that “divinity is not playful.”

Dillard relishes winter when the natural world strips itself. She sees this stripping away as important for humanity. She gives no details about her everyday concerns. She wonders if we waste energy saying hello to ourselves. She quotes a Hasid master about walking with a pure and holy mind.

Annie Dillard herself said it best in the afterword she wrote in 1999 that is included in this edition.

She confessed, "I'm afraid I suffered youth's drawback, too: a love of grand sentences, and fancied a grand sentence was not quite done until it was overdone."

This admission gives us a peek into the mind of a talented writer. Youth often brings with it a certain exuberance and a desire to make a statement. Dillard, in her younger days, was no exception. She had a penchant for constructing elaborate and grand sentences, believing that they were not truly complete until they were pushed to the extreme.

This tendency may have been a part of her creative process, a way for her to explore the boundaries of language and expression. However, as she matured, she likely gained a better understanding of the art of writing and the importance of balance.

Nonetheless, her early works, with their overdone sentences, still hold a certain charm and beauty. They are a testament to her youthful spirit and her unwavering dedication to the craft of writing.

I first read this perhaps ten years or more ago. Vividly I recall a comment from a friend in a book group. She questioned, "And just what was it that you liked about this book?" Obviously, she didn't care for it at all. I have as difficult a time understanding her lack of appreciation as her question to me. What didn't I like? I savored the insights, the observations, the honesty, the growth and the reflections. The author's ability to capture these elements so beautifully was truly remarkable.

I loved the book with a passion. I also adored the author's way with words. The prose was like a gentle breeze, caressing my soul and transporting me to a world of wonder and simplicity. Since that time, I have purchased several copies and given them to friends who I hoped would share and understand my love affair with nature and simplicity.

This book is now due for a reread. I know just where it is, sitting patiently on my bookshelf, waiting to be rediscovered. I can't wait to immerse myself in its pages once again and experience the magic all over again.

3.5 stars, rounded down.

I must admit that Pilgrim at Tinker Creek took me by surprise. It was a book club selection, and I went into it without any prior knowledge. The book captures a year of nature in Virginia's Roanoke Valley. It was a perfect choice for my church's book club as it has a lot to do with the wonder and awe inspired by nature.

Living in the semi-rural mid-Atlantic, much of what was described in the book felt familiar to me, such as the trees and the wildlife. I really enjoyed learning all the interesting facts while reading this.

Eudora Welty described this book as a meditation, and that's an apt description. Not a lot seems to happen on the surface, but in reality, everything is happening. Like the Transcendentalism she often cites, it's all about being aware and paying attention to the tiniest details of nature. I found myself highlighting numerous phrases. However, for large sections of the book, I also felt strangely detached. It didn't consistently work for me. I don't do well when books veer too far into the realm of the "woowoo," and this one did. I often felt confused rather than awed. In the afterword, I learned that she wrote this when she was only 27. She even says, looking back, "I'm afraid I suffered youth's drawback, too: a love of grand sentences, and fancied a grand sentence was not quite done until it was overdone." I completely agree with her self-assessment.

For fans of this book, I would recommend A Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkyl.

I was actually glad that it was over, and the afterword would better be the preface as a little guidance at the start can do no harm.

I like reading nature books, books about what nature does to you as a human being, or about how smart everything is and how diverse life is. When I read the book "Notes from the edge" a few years ago, I did nothing but WhatsApp facts about ants to my husband. (I admit I have forgotten everything by now, but not what this book did to me, the wonder it aroused.)

I thus started "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" with very high expectations, but to be honest, this book didn't really suit me. There are very beautiful, yes, magnificent passages in the book. No, I will never forget the courtship behavior of the heron. It is even worse than I thought. But for the rest, I often thought "what has she smoked?". That's it. Dillard goes so far in her admiration (both positive and negative) of the nature around her that she always seems to be in ecstasy, exalted, like a mystic in the Middle Ages.

The book is structured by seasons and in good and evil. After the wonder about creation, there is the evil about creation, the uselessness of fertility, the only goal being death and sorrow.

The author was still very young when she wrote the book, which probably explains her exaggerated perception. I have to admire her for her patience and powers of observation, her ability to become invisible. But there are many nature books that I preferred to read.

A tremendous study in the spirit of Goethean science, peering into what underlies all that lives, the urphänomen: “I retreat: not inside myself, but outside myself, so that I am a tissue of senses. Whatever I see is plenty, abundance. I am the skin of water the wind plays over; I am petal, feather, stone.”

This remarkable work showcases intellectual stamina and astonishing spiritual depth. The questions explored at Tinker Creek are of a religious nature, encountered through the lives of frogs, cicadas, grasshoppers, and caribou: “This is what I had come for, just this, and nothing more…. this is my city, my culture, and all the world I need.” There is a secret to seeing, that grace is not something to be actively sought but rather something that comes upon one... “The most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.” Cicadas fill the air “with a plaintive, mysterious urgency.” Earthworms “in staggering processions lurch through the grit underfoot, gobbling downed leaves and spewing forth castings.” A sandstone ledge is “stained with poke-berry juice, like an altar bloodied.”

Life at Tinker Creek stands in stark contrast to urban life: “I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, ‘next year…I’ll start living; next year… I’ll start my life.” The wild is both instinctively familiar and unfamiliar: “Must I then part ways with the only world I know?” she asks. “I had thought to live by the side of the creek in order to shape my life to its free flow. But… is human culture with its values my only home after all?” Paying attention opens us not only to awe and wonderment but also to horror, discomfort, volatility, and brutality. A frog is sucked dry from the inside by a giant water bug: this is the “assault of real things, living and still,” “the real world, not the world gilded and pearled.”

Here we find an intricate theological vision, with the living world serving as both text and teacher. The living world, in all its terrific beauty and brutality. A goldfinch releases thistledown into the air: “The thistle is part of Adam’s curse. If this furling air is fallen, then the fall was happy indeed. If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom…. Creation itself was the fall, a burst into the thorny beauty of the real.”

For its numerous moments of poignant beauty, I am truly glad to have delved into this Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir/diary. It chronicles Dillard's single year of exploring the natural world just beyond her Blue Ridge Valley doorstep.

The sections that vividly placed me in the midst of the lives (and deaths) of insects, mammals, reptiles, avians, and plants of every conceivable kind were simply sublime. I, too, take great delight in exploring "the great outdoors", so these best moments spoke powerfully to my heart.

Regrettably, there were three aspects of this book that hindered such intense connections from happening as frequently as they could have. It's important to note that these are unique to the individual reader and may not necessarily impede your own appreciation.

First, since this is a memoir, the narrator is often at the forefront. She casts a shadow over much of the narrative, inserting herself into the scenes she描绘s and frequently obstructing the reader's view. For example, one doesn't see the copperhead on the sandstone rock without first seeing the narrator seated beside it. Or one doesn't approach an oblivious muskrat without first following the narrator's "stalking" maneuvers and then having to look over her shoulder to catch a glimpse. There seems to be more of the narrator's interpretation than the actual Tinker Creek.

Second, there are extended passages of philosophical musings, presented in effusive poetic language, that tend to confuse rather than inspire. At such times, the narrator's transcendent experiences failed to resonate with me, which was a disappointment. Consider the following quotes:

"Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of things both great and small." Oooh. Ahhh... What?

"The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all." No you wouldn't. You can't even spy on a rodent from the bridge without smoking a cigarette.

"Intricacy means that there is a fluted fringe to the something that exists over against nothing, a fringe that rises and spreads, burgeoning in detail." Either share those mushrooms with me or stop talking.

Finally, there are frequent references to the Judeo-Christian viewpoint, including direct quotations from the Bible. Dillard does mention Buddhism as well, but she mainly filters things through the lens of the Old and New Testaments. Once again, this puts the narrator in the spotlight and, for me, Tinker Creek seemed to fade into the background during these contemplations.

To be sure, there are some 5-star moments in this book, but there are also several that barely rated a 2 and disrupted whatever charm had just been created. Therefore, I'm giving this one 3.5 stars.

4.25
An Excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Our excessive emotions are so blatantly painful and harmful to us as a species that it is almost难以置信 that they evolved.

Other creatures are able to have successful matings and even stable societies without emotion. They have the added advantage that they never have to mourn. However, some higher animals have emotions that we believe are similar to ours...

… Emotions are the curse, not death. Emotions seem to have been imposed on a few odd individuals as a special curse out of malevolence.

All right then, it is our emotions that are wrong. We are the freaks, the world is fine, and let us all get lobotomies to return us to a natural state. We can then leave the library, go back to the creek after being lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You go first.” Annie Dillard

This excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard presents a thought-provoking perspective on emotions. Dillard questions the evolution of excessive emotions, suggesting that they may be more of a curse than a blessing. She compares the emotional lives of humans to those of other creatures, noting that many species manage to thrive without the turmoil of intense emotions. Dillard even goes so far as to suggest that we consider getting lobotomies to rid ourselves of our emotions and return to a more natural, untroubled state. This radical idea challenges us to think deeply about the role of emotions in our lives and whether they are truly necessary for our well-being.

I had never heard of this book or its author before. However, I chanced upon a reference to it while reading an essay by Tish Harrison Warren in the NY Times, titled "How to Pray With Our Eyes Open." Warren remarks about Dillard, "Rather than closing her eyes to focus on things above, on so-called spiritual things, prayer becomes an act of noticing, of reveling, of cultivating the attention that leads to devotion." It seemed to me that I might have something in common with Dillard. As someone who often prefers a walk by the Potomac River to going to church on a Sunday morning, I could relate to her approach.

I was truly amazed at Dillard's passion for nature. She found numerous ways to notice the animals, plants, and the entire natural world around her Virginia home. What's more, I was astounded by her in-depth knowledge, considering that she didn't have the internet when she wrote this book in 1974 (for which she won the Pulitzer Prize).

I have to admit that after reading half the book, I resorted to some heavy skimming to reach the end. I simply didn't have the patience to engage with all the in-depth observations. But I like to believe that this book will still have an impact on me. "Being present" and "mindfulness" were not the buzzwords in 1974 that they are today, yet Dillard nevertheless provided valuable lessons in strengthening these skills. She also offered an alternative concept of prayer, which I found quite thought-provoking.