Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard 1974

Introduction

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, published in 1974, is a nonfiction work that defies categorization. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, it is often read as an example of American nature writing or as a meditation. Annie Dillard, the author, resists these labels, preferring to think of the book as a theological treatise. The book is frequently described as a collection of essays, but Dillard insists that the work is an integrated whole. Perhaps it is because the book succeeds on so many levels that it has been so widely read and admired.

The book is a series of internal monologues and reflections spoken by an unnamed narrator. Over the course of a year, she walks alone through the land surrounding Tinker Creek, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Roanoke, Virginia. As she observes the changing of the seasons and the corresponding behaviors of the plants and animals around her, she reflects on the nature of the world and of the God who set it in motion. The narrator is determined to present the natural world as it truly is, not sentimentally or selectively. Therefore, she is as likely to reflect on a frog being sucked dry by an insect as on the slant of light that strikes a certain springtime tree. Whether the images are cruel or lovely, the language is beautiful and poetic, and insistently celebratory.

Author Biography

Meta Ann Doak was born into an upper-middle-class family on April 30, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She and her two younger sisters were raised under the influences of their free-thinking parents, their wealthy paternal grandparents who lived nearby, and an African-American domestic servant. "Annie" was encouraged from the beginning to think and act independently, to tell stories, and to read books. She took piano and dance lessons, socialized at the country club, and attended the Ellis School, a private school for girls where she studied Latin, French, and German. But she had a keen interest in the natural world even as a girl, and assembled collections of rocks, bugs, and other elements of nature, as well as a collection of favorite poems. Dillard has recounted her early years in an autobiography, An American Childhood (1987).

Dillard's high school years were turbulent. Like many teenagers, she took up smoking and driving fast, and wrote angry poetry about the hypocrisy and emotional impoverishment of the adults around her. For a time, she even stopped attending the Presbyterian Church she had belonged to since childhood, but she soon felt the loss and returned. Dillard's struggle to understand God and religion and her fascination with poetic language—even her smoking—surface throughout her writing, including Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

After high school, Dillard attended Hollins College, a women's college near Roanoke, Virginia, and studied creative writing and religion. At the end of her sophomore year, she married one of her creative writing professors, Richard Dillard. Richard was a strong influence on her writing, encouraging her to develop her skills as a poet and a natural historian. During the marriage, Dillard finished her undergraduate degree in English literature and completed a master's. The topic of her master's thesis was Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). Later, she would use Walden as the model for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

For the next few years, Dillard painted, wrote poetry, read widely, volunteered at local community agencies, and kept extensive journals of her observations and thoughts. In 1973, she turned those journals into Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, working as many as fifteen hours a day to complete the manuscript. She described the process of writing the book in The Writing Life (1989). Individual chapters of Pilgrim were published as essays in influential magazines, and when the full book was published in 1974, it was an immediate success. The book won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. At the time, Annie Dillard was just thirty years old. She eventually divorced Dillard and, in 1980, married writer Gary Clevidence.

Over the past quarter century, Dillard has published eight more books, including a novel, two collections of poetry, and several nonfiction volumes. These books have been well received, but Dillard is still known primarily as the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She married another professor and writer, Robert D. Richardson Jr. in 1988.

Summary

Chapter One: "Heaven and Earth in Jest"

The opening of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is one of the most famous passages from the book. "I used to have a cat," the book begins. The narrator reports that she was in the habit of sleeping naked in front of an open window, and the cat would use that window to return to the house at night after hunting. In the morning, the narrator would awaken to find her body "covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses."

This opening passage introduces several important ideas and approaches that will operate through the entire book. Dillard insistently presents the natural world as both beautiful and cruel, like the image of roses painted in blood. She demonstrates throughout the book that to discover nature, one must actively put oneself in its way. The narrator sleeps naked, with the windows open, to put no barriers between herself and the natural world. But the natural world is a manifestation of God, and it is God she is really seeking to understand through the book. Dillard introduces the theme of religion as the narrator washes the bloodstains off her body, wondering whether they are "the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain." Finally, the anecdote structure itself is typical; throughout the book, Dillard weaves together passages of reflection, description, and narration.

The book's structure is loosely chronological, moving from January to December. "Heaven and Earth in Jest" is set in January, and several passages in present tense read like a naturalist's journal. But Dillard freely uses memories from other seasons and other years. "I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood," the narrator says, explaining both her method and her purpose.

Chapter Two: "Seeing"

The ten sections of chapter two all explore the question of what it means to really see. The narrator explains how she has trained herself to see insects in flight, hidden birds in trees, and other common occurrences in nature that most people miss because the events are too small or happen too quickly. She spends hours on a log watching for muskrats and brings home pond water to study under a microscope. In a long passage, she tells about patients who benefitted from the first cataract operations, and their difficulties in trying to see with their eyes after a lifetime of blindness. As the narrator contemplates different ways of seeing, she realizes, "I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam."

Chapter Three: "Winter"

"Winter" begins on the first of February with the movements of large flocks of starlings that live in the area. Down by the creek, the narrator watches a coot and thinks about the frogs and turtles asleep under the mud. Her forays outside are shorter, and she spends evenings in front of the fireplace reading books about travel and about nature. Her only companions are a goldfish named Ellery Channing (after a friend of Henry David Thoreau) and the spiders that are allowed "the run of the house."

Chapter Four: "The Fixed"

In this chapter, the narrator discusses insects and stars. She has learned to recognize praying mantis egg cases in the wild, and she has brought one home and tied it to a branch near her window so she can observe the hatching. In the cold of February, she thinks about June and the steadiness of insects and the seeming fixedness of the stars.

Chapter Five: "Untying the Knot"

This short chapter takes its title from a snake skin the narrator finds in the woods. The skin appears to be tied in a knot, continuous, as the seasons are "continuous loops." The narrator contemplates the changing of the seasons and hopes to be alert and notice the exact moment when winter becomes spring.

Chapter Six: "The Present"

It is March. Surprisingly, as the chapter opens, the narrator is at a gas station on an interstate highway, talking with the station attendant. But it is not the conversation that is important; rather, the narrator focuses on a beagle puppy, whose fur she rubs as she sips her coffee. For a moment, she feels entirely alive: "This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain."

The narrator reflects on human consciousness and self-consciousness, which act against being in the present and against being in the presence of God. She affirms her intention to push away connections with cities, with people. The flowing creek is new every second, and it is in the creek that grace can be found.

Chapter Seven: "Spring"

Spring unfolds through April and May, and the narrator has missed spring's beginning. Plants are greening and flowering, and hibernating animals are reappearing. The narrator feels an urgency to examine every creature quickly before summer comes and they begin to decay and devour each other.

Chapter Eight: "Intricacy"

This chapter contains more meditation than anecdote. In June, the narrator ponders the smallest things—red blood cells in a goldfish's tail, blooming plankton, the horsehair worm, molecules, and atoms. In the intricacy of the universe, she finds confirmation of God's presence and plan: "Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator's exuberance that grew such a tangle."

Chapter Nine: "Flood"

Like many of Dillard's chapter titles, "The Flood" is meant to be taken both literally and figuratively. This chapter, which opens with the first day of summer, describes an actual flooding of Tinker Creek and its effects on the landscape, the animals, and the narrator's human neighbors. It is among the most consistently narrative chapters of the book. The rising water brings with it a flood of emotions and thoughts, leaving the narrator feeling "dizzy, drawn, mauled."

Chapter Ten: "Fecundity"

Fecundity means "fruitfulness," and this chapter explores plants and animals, including fish, poppies, field mice, and bamboo, that grow quickly or produce large numbers of offspring. Of course, these creatures are so prolific because they must be: of a million fish eggs laid, only a few will survive to hatch. "What kind of a world is this, anyway," the narrator asks. "Are we dealing in life, or in death?"

Chapter Eleven: "Stalking"

As summer progresses, the narrator practices her skills at stalking animals, especially animals that do not wish to be seen, including fish, herons, and muskrats. As she watches fish, she thinks about fish as an ancient symbol for Christ and for the spirit. In a long passage, she describes how she has spent years learning to stalk muskrats. But stalking animals is not the end in itself: "You have to stalk the spirit, too."

Chapter Twelve: "Nightwatch"

In late summer, the narrator watches grasshoppers and locusts. She takes a sleeping bag and a sandwich to spend a night outside. As she watches the sunset and listens to the night sounds, she thinks, "this is my city, my culture, and all the world I need."

Chapter Thirteen: "The Horns of the Altar"

At mid-September, the narrator ponders poisons, parasites, and pests. In the natural world, creatures eat one another or die of other causes. The chapter title refers to altars used for sacrifices in the Old Testament of the Judeo-Christian Bible. Animals to be sacrificed would be tied to "horns," or rising side pieces, so that they would be suspended above burning coals. The narrator is aware of herself as a potential sacrifice, as eventual food for maggots and parasites. "I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too."

Chapter Fourteen: "Northing"

As October and November pass, the narrator thinks about heading north, facing directly into the coming winter. Watching butterflies and geese migrating south, she wishes to go north, to find a place where the wind and the view will be unimpeded, where she can find an austere simplicity. She believes that stillness will open her up to the presence of God.

Chapter Fifteen: "The Waters of Separation"

At the winter solstice, the weather is unusually warm. The narrator wanders through the brown landscape following a bee and reflecting on the year that has passed. The chapter title refers to ceremonial water used in the Old Testament for purifying the unclean. For Dillard, Tinker Creek flows with "the waters of beauty and mystery" and also with the waters of separation. In contemplating the natural world, she approaches God but separates herself from other people and from the things of this world. She drinks of this water willingly and with thanks.

Key Figures

The Narrator

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is written in the first person; that is, the narrator continually refers to herself as "I." But the book is not an autobiography, and the author is not the narrator. In fact, an early draft of the manuscript was set in New England and was narrated by a young man. For Dillard, the identity of the speaker was not central to her explorations. The narrator of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, then, may more properly be thought of as a persona than as Dillard herself.

Few biographical details can be discerned about the narrator. She lives near Tinker Creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She is well-educated and has read widely, and she spends most of her time alone, closely observing the natural world. She seems to have no daily responsibilities or occupations, but has the time and the patience to spend hours alone in one place watching the light changing or a duck eating. She once had a cat, but she does not mention any family, and she does not seek the company of other humans except for an occasional evening game of pinochle with unnamed friends. No other person plays a significant role in the book.

Themes

Faith and Spirituality

As the first word of the title suggests, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is primarily a book about seeking God. A "pilgrim" may be merely a person who travels, but more commonly the word is used to describe someone who travels to a holy place. For the narrator, the creek itself is as sacred as a church; it is here that she encounters God's grace in its purest form: "So many things have been shown me 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." In using water as a symbol of God's presence and grace, Dillard is drawing on centuries of religious tradition.

Throughout the book, Dillard balances the seemingly opposing forces of heaven and Earth, of God as the creator of beauty and of horror. Much of the imagery in the book is of the beauty and complexity of nature, reflecting God's grace. In every sunset, every egg case, every snake skin, the narrator sees God's generosity. But at times, reading about a praying mantis that has devoured her mate or contemplating hoards of parasites, she rails against the cruelties of nature, asking, "What kind of a world is this, anyway?" She wonders whether the mystery of cruelty is not part of God's plan. "It could be," she muses, that God has spread "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." She seems to conclude that, ultimately, humans must accept the contradictions of this world—must embrace death and darkness as part of the cycle of life and light.

Dillard has carefully studied the Bible, as demonstrated by the many biblical quotations and allusions throughout the book. But essential to Dillard's vision is the belief that the natural world is also a vehicle for spiritual insight. Just as the narrator has had to train herself to stalk wild animals to be in their presence, so she must also stalk God, seeking Him out where He is and as He is.

Individual and Society

A recurring idea in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the narrator's belief that she must choose between embracing nature and embracing human society. In fact, she does not seem to have close ties with any living humans. She alludes occasionally to playing baseball or pinochle—games that cannot be played in solitude—but she never names her companions. She is aware of neighborhood boys, and she knows the names of the people who own the property along Tinker Creek and of those who are endangered by the flood. But there is no strong feeling, positive or negative, expressed in any of her human contacts. While a puppy or a sunrise can leave her breathless, people do not.

Media Adaptations

• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was published as an unabridged audio book by the American Library Association in 1995. The reading is by Barbara Rosenblat.
• Another unabridged edition on audiocassette, read by Grace Conlin, was produced by Blackstone Audio Books in 1993. This version is no longer available on cassettes, but http://www.audible.com offers it for sale as a downloadable file.

Her isolation is both inevitable and intentional. On the one hand, she feels unlike other people. She does not know others who rhapsodize as she does over slugs and spiders, and at times she feels like "a freak." More importantly, she has willed herself to be alone, to live in the world of nature instead of the world of the city. She has experienced both, and remembers in "The Present" the "human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained." But human connection is a distraction, making it difficult to live in the present. In the same chapter, she almost drifts away into a memory of dancing and music years before, and she forcefully wills herself to abandon the memory: "I stir. The heave of my shoulders returns me to the present … and I yank myself away, shove off, seeking live water."

Although the persona who explores Tinker Creek from January to December 1972 lives alone with only goldfish and spiders for company, Annie Dillard was married and living with her husband at the time she wrote the book. She spent a great deal of time volunteering in her community, meeting with a writing group, and socializing with friends. The solitude of the narrator is, therefore, an intentional creation of the writer. As the narrator explains in "Fecundity," "I must go down to the creek again. It is where I belong, although as I become closer to it, my fellows appear more and more freakish, and my home in the library more and more limited. Imperceptibly at first, and now consciously, I shy away from the arts, from the human emotional stew."

Topics for Further Study

• Find out more about the Roman Catholic monk Thomas Merton, who was also a poet and a political activist. What causes did he speak out about? How did he understand the ideal balance between a life of contemplation and a life of activism?
• Read some excerpts from Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods, especially one or two passages in which he gives detailed accounts of his observations of nature. In terms of the amount of precise detail, how do his accounts compare with Dillard's? How would you compare the conclusions Thoreau and Dillard draw from their observations?
• For a short time, Dillard considered submitting her manuscript to publishers under the name "A. Dillard" so the publishers would assume the author was a man. Do you think this would have fooled them? If you did not know the name of the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, what clues in the text would suggest a female author? Consider language, imagery, and attitude.
• Using balls to represent the Earth and the Sun, demonstrate the meanings of the terms "winter solstice" and "summer solstice." Explain how the position of the Earth relative to the Sun at each solstice affects the weather where you live.
• Spend an hour or more alone, replicating one of Dillard's activities: Stalk a muskrat or other animal to see how close you can get; sit still outside at sunrise or sunset and watch the light change; or pat a puppy and try to think of nothing else except what you are doing. Write a brief essay in which you describe the experience.

Nature

Although it does not seem to be what Dillard intended, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is perhaps most frequently read as a piece of nature writing. The book is filled with narratives, descriptions, and unusual facts about a catalog of plants and animals. Some of the most famous passages in the book come from the writer's own observations; for example the description of the tomcat with bloody paws, the frog being sucked dry by a giant water bug, or the young muskrat floating on its back. Dillard is just as vivid when her narrator is retelling an observation she has read somewhere else: J. Henri Fabre's caterpillars walking a never-ending circular trail around the mouth of a vase, or his female praying mantis mating with a male whose head she has already eaten. For many readers, these glimpses of the world outside are valuable in themselves, without symbolizing anything beyond the literal.

On a practical level, the reader of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek learns a great deal about the natural world, primarily about the flora and fauna in the area around Tinker Creek. Readers who care to learn may gather enough information to begin their own explorations—to identify a monarch butterfly pupa or a sycamore tree. They may also put together an impressive reading list of some of the books from which Dillard has taught herself. Dillard combines her own observations with those of other writers to produce a record of the changing natural world through the calendar year, from January to December. In doing so, and in making it seem so beautiful and fascinating, she encourages the reader to do the same. Dillard has learned much of her natural history from reading books, and her own book similarly instructs her readers.

Science and Technology

As she pieces together an understanding of God and the natural world, the narrator also considers what science can and cannot tell her. Repeatedly, she looks through microscopes or telescopes, using technology to see things that the naked eye cannot reveal. Several of her stories, including the account of the caterpillars following each other around the rim of a vase, demonstrate knowledge gained through scientific experimentation. In her acceptance of animal behavior in all its seeming cruelty, the narrator exhibits a scientist's objectivity. But she is fully aware of the limits of science. In "Stalking," for example, she discusses the principle of indeterminacy, which governs the study of atomic particles. The more scientists learn, she says, the more they become aware that they can never truly know: "we know now for sure that there is no knowing.… The use of instruments and the very fact an observer seem to bollix [bungle]the observations; as a consequence, physicists are saying that they cannot study nature per se, but only their own investigation of nature."

Dillard comes back to the limits of science several times throughout Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Ultimately, the impossibility of knowing everything both frustrates and comforts the narrator. She would like to find things out, and she keeps returninging to books and to observation, but she will never know it all. On the other hand, the very fact of the world being beyond human comprehension is, for her, confirmation of the existence of God.

Style

Structure

The fifteen essays or chapters of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek are organized into two parallel structures. The more obvious structure follows the calendar year from January, in the chapters "Heaven and Earth in Jest" and "Seeing," through spring, summer, and autumn to December 21 in the last chapter, "The Waters of Separation." The book is meant to resemble a polished journal that the narrator kept of her observations through one year, but in fact, the material was pulled together from twenty volumes of journals that Dillard kept over several years. The calendar year structure, describing the changes in the seasons, is a convention of American nature writing that has been used by Henry David Thoreau, Edwin Way Teale, Henry Beston, Aldo Leopold, and others.

A less obvious structure has been pointed out by Dillard herself and supports her insistence that the book be read as a whole, not as a collection of essays. As quoted in Sandra Humble Johnson's The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard, Dillard explains that the structure of the book follows the path of the medieval mystic toward God. The first seven chapters represent the via positiva, or "the journey to God through action & will & materials." In these chapters, Dillard focuses on the beauty and intricacy of nature. After a meditative eighth chapter, "Intricacy," the last seven chapters represent the via negativa, or "the spirit's revulsion at time and death." In this half of the book, beginning with the destruction of "Flood," Dillard's anecdotes are more negative, focusing more on parasites, poisons, and death.

Setting

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is set, as the title suggests, "by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia's Blue Ridge" in the year 1972. The creek is outside the small town of Hollins, home of Hollins College. Dillard completed her bachelor's and master's degrees at Hollins College and lived near Tinker Creek for nine years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although the book appears to be a factual representation of place and time, the real Tinker Creek is not so isolated and wild as readers may assume. Through careful selection of detail, Dillard makes the area seem quiet, undeveloped, and largely uninhabited. Compare the impression of wilderness Dillard creates for this book to the way she describes the same locations in a later essay, "Living Like Weasels": "This is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none is visible here. There's a 55 m.p.h. highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other.… The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods, fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks." For Pilgrim, she has narrowed her focus to specific moments and specific images, leaving out the details that work against her purpose. The setting of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is, therefore, a slightly fictionalized version of a real place.

Similarly, the book appears to record the events of one calendar year, 1972. Obviously, the chapters also include information from the narrator's reading and from her past. The stories from her own past are clearly tagged with phrases like "several years ago" or "once." These narratives are written in the past tense. Narratives that are meant to be immediate ("I am sitting") or very recent ("yesterday") are presented as though they occurred in the order told and within one year. These observations actually occurred over a period of several years.

Although Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is classified as nonfiction, it has elements of fiction in its setting. It has the appearance of a journal or an autobiography, but it is not one. Rather, it is a series of reflections set into a journal form.

Figurative Language

One of the most admired qualities of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the beauty and power of its language. Dillard studied creative writing at Hollins College and has published two volumes of poetry. Her concern with figurative or "poetic" language is apparent on every page. Because nature is so evocative for Dillard, she uses grand language to describe it, particularly when she is awed. Describing her reaction to "the tree with the lights in it," she writes, "The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam." In this line, she is speaking metaphorically, especially with the verbs "open," "roars" and "slam." The line is made more powerful by the repetition of "comes and goes, mostly goes" and "I live for it, for the moment," and the unusual word "spate" elevates the line further. This line and countless others like it strike many readers as more like poetry than like prose.

Historical Context

The 1960s and 1970s

The years during which Dillard lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains, keeping her journals and writing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, were among the most turbulent in recent United States history. In the five years before she began writing in 1973, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated; the United States withdrew from Vietnam after a long and unsuccessful military action in which tens of thousands of Americans died; the presidency of Richard Nixon had started to unravel because of the scandal known as "Watergate"; the nation was feeling the first effects of an energy crisis; an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, addressing gender equality issues, was passed by Congress but never ratified by the states.

It is striking, then—and for some critics at the time it was disturbing—that Dillard mentions none of these things in her book. Dillard's focus is both inward and outward, but her concerns are spiritual, not social or political. She is aware of what is going on in the world; she pores over the newspapers and spends time in the library. She reads and admires the monk Thomas Merton, who balanced a contemplative life with activism against nuclear weapons. But Dillard chooses in this work to direct her gaze away from social concerns, as she explains in "Intricacy": "I would like to see it all, to understand it, but I must start somewhere, so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of three hundred redwings from an Osage orange, with the goldfish bowl and the snakeskin, and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems."

Nature Writing

Although Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has proven difficult for readers to categorize, it is most often located in the genre of nature writing. Nature writing is not so strictly defined as the sonnet or the novel, but there are several criteria that critics agree upon. Generally, nature writing is nonfiction prose set in the wilderness or in a rural area. Its primary focus is on accurate but beautifully rendered descriptions of the natural phenomena that occur in one limited place, not on political or social commentary. The speaker or narrator of a piece of nature writing reports her own observations; she does not interfere with nature, but carefully and patiently records every detail. Most importantly, she is well-educated and checks her facts. It is not enough to write gushing prose about the beauty of a heron at sunset; the nature writer must have enough scientific knowledge to place the scene in its biological, climatological, and even cosmological context.

Early English writers, who lacked what we would consider today to be basic scientific knowledge of the world, must have found nature to be as unpredictable and frightening as it was beautiful and awe-inspiring. They did not know much about the natural world except how it affected them, and in accordance with Judeo-Christian thought of the time, they believed that humans were set apart from nature by God—apart from it and above it. Images of nature in literature tended to be used as a backdrop for more important human activity, or as a symbol of human emotions and spirit. In these works, nature exists to serve and to represent humans. Details about flowers or birds or mountains tend to be vague and impressive, rather than detailed and accurate. Writers and readers alike had little knowledge about the behavior of muskrats, and little interest in obtaining more. What was more important was what a muskrat could represent—mystery, or industry, or beauty, or danger.

Compare & Contrast

• 1970: On April 22, the first Earth Day is observed, marking a strong interest in environmental issues across the United States.

  Today: Although a small group of environmental advocates tries to create a sensation, the thirtieth anniversary of Earth Day receives scant attention in the nation's newspapers.

• 1974: Dillard considers submitting her manuscript of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek under the name "A. Dillard," because she does not believe that a book with theological themes written by a woman will sell many copies.

  Today: Although publications by men still out number those by women in the fields of religion and philosophy, women are accepted as making important contributions in these disciplines.

• 1975: Environmental literature is popular with general readers and with critics. Annie Dillard wins the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Gary Snyder wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Turtle Island, a collection of nature poems.

  Today: Nature writers including Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass, and Ann Zwinger reach a small but dedicated readership.

In the nineteenth century, however, two important books changed the way writers and others looked at the natural world, and became the origins of what is today called nature writing or environmental literature. The first book, published in 1845, by Henry David Thoreau, was Walden, or, Life in the Woods. Walden, considered one of the classic works of American literature, is an account of two years Thoreau spent living in a small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau combines passages of reflection on daily life, government, and society with passages of close examination of worms and beans and rain. Others had looked at nature objectively, and for its own sake, without attributing human characteristics to it, but Thoreau's work was so beautifully written and clearly argued that it reached a large audience and endured.

The second important book was Charles Darwin's 1859 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin's book proposed for the first time that humans, and all living creatures, have evolved over time from previous species. It is difficult for us today to understand how shocking this idea was for Darwin's first readers. Darwin was saying that humans are not above nature, but a part of it; he claimed that life has evolved in a continuing pattern, rather than being set down on earth for the pleasure and use of humans. With this new sense of nature and human-kind's role in it, there came a new interest in studying and classifying the natural world, in understanding it on its own terms.

The tradition of nature writing in the United States can be traced to the journals and essays of the earliest explorers in the New World. The most important works include Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1845); John Muir's The Mountains of California (1894); Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain (1903); and Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949). The last third of the twentieth century saw a new wave of nature writing, and it is this movement in which Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is frequently placed. Some critics have taken issue with Dillard's identification as a nature writer because of what Linda Smith, author of Annie Dillard in Twayne's United States Authors Series, calls her "consistent—even stubborn—devotion to traditional Christianity" and her "concern with aesthetics." But many critics have gone so far as to rank Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as John Tallmadge did in his essay "Beyond the Excursion: Initiatory Themes in Annie Dillard and Terry Tempest Williams," as one of "the most powerful works to appear in the current renaissance of American nature writing."

Critical Overview

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is widely recognized as an important personal essay, uniquely and powerfully combining theology and nature writing. Nancy Parrish reports in Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers that the book's success was immediate: "thirty-seven thousand copies of Pilgrim were sold within two months of first publication; the book went through eight printings in the first two years; paperback rights and book-of the-Month Club selection brought her $250,000 within three months." The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

Most early reviewers responded favorably to the book, including Eva Hoffman, writing for Commentary, who termed Dillard a "connoisseur of the spirit" and praised her for her "rare ability to create emotional tone." Others, including the fiction and essay writer Eudora Welty (herself a Pulitzer Prize winner), found Dillard's language and structure needlessly opaque. In a review for the New York Times Book Review, Welty quoted Dillard's passage about the "great dog Death" at the end of the "Fecundity" chapter and commented, "I honestly do not know what she is talking about at such times. The only thing I could swear to is that the writing here leaves something to be desired."

Aside from reviews, there was no criticism of the book for several years. In 1983, Margaret Loewen Reimer's Critique article, "The Dialectical Vision of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, " initiated a small body of criticism dealing with Dillard's religious themes. This body of criticism, which frequently debates whether Dillard is more an existentialist or a transcendentalist, tends to be written in academic language that makes it difficult for beginning students.

More accessible, and more common, are the critics who address Dillard as a nature writer. Vera Norwood's "Heroines of Nature: Four Women Respond to the American Landscape," in The Ecocriticism Reader, examines Dillard as playing an important role in the development of female nature writers and finds that she is among those who "freely choose to seek out wild nature and defend it, thus defying the traditions limiting women access to and appreciation of the natural environment, but who also conclude their explorations in a state of ambivalence." Linda Smith, author of the Twayne's United States Authors series volume Annie Dillard, argues that, because of its concern with religion, the book is not primarily nature writing. But James McClintock, in "'Pray Without Ceasing': Annie Dillard among the Nature Writers," disagrees, stating, "Nature writing in America has always been religious or quasi-religious." He concludes that Dillard does belong "among the nature writers" because, "In Dillard's essays, the same persona speaks to us as from the works of other nature writers—the solitary figure in nature, moved to philosophical speculation and, finally, to awe and wonder."

While most critics have admired Dillard's acute powers of observation and her powerful connection with the natural world, more than a few have found her seeming lack of connection with human society unsettling. The poet Hayden Carruth, in his early review in Virginia Quarterly Review, found that the book made "little reference to life on this planet at this moment, its hazards and misdirections, and to this extent it is a dangerous book, literally a subversive book." Gary McIlroy acknowledges in his essay " Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the Social Legacy of Walden" that this book has less human interaction than the work Dillard patterned it after, Walden, but argues that solitude is appropriate for her spiritual quest: "Annie Dillard goes into the woods to claim her spiritual heritage. Like a prophet, she travels alone." In the field of literary criticism about nature writing, Dillard is a major figure. Nearly every significant collection of essays about nature writing, or ecocriticism (the belief that women share a special bond with nature and that both women and nature have been exploited by men) or ecofeminism (the study of literature and the environment) includes an essay about Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Criticism

Cynthia Bily

Bily is an instructor of writing and literature at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan. In this essay, she explores the role of reading in Dillard's vision of the student of nature.

The term nature writing refers to the work of those writers since the time of Thoreau and Darwin who have consciously tried to go out into nature, look at it closely, and report what they see, without sentimentalizing or anthropomorphizing, without getting in the way of the natural events they observe, and without using nature as a backdrop for a political or social commentary. It is into this genre of writing that Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is usually classified. Dillard wrote her master's thesis on Walden, and used Thoreau's book as a model for her own.

Dillard's reliance on Thoreau is interesting in many ways. Looking at both books together, readers can learn a great deal about how the world changed in the hundred or so years between publications. What information was available to Dillard that Thoreau did not have? What were the new advancements in science? What had naturalists observed and recorded about the behaviors of living creatures? To what extent can a person step out of the technological world and encounter nature purely, on its own terms? All of these are interesting questions, worthy of consideration. But this essay is more interested in something that binds Thoreau and Dillard together across the span of a hundred years: their lives as readers and writers. Although they believe that people must clear their minds and open their hearts to nature, without interjecting their intellect and their expectations, they turn again and again to books for confirmation or clarification of what they have seen.

Thoreau devotes an entire chapter to "Reading," and mentions the subject throughout his book. He brings little with him to his cabin in the woods, but he does bring books, as he explains: "My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world." He keeps a copy of the Iliad on his table, and like most of his contemporaries he knows much of the Bible by heart. In Thoreau's mind, studying books and studying nature are paired, and "We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old" as give up studying the classics. The written word, he says, "is the work of art nearest to life itself."

Yet a lover of the written word must be careful not to let books replace actual experience. Thoreau writes, "No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected … compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?" For his first summer in the cabin, Thoreau put his books away.

Dillard faces the same struggle to balance her essential trust in the written word and the need to get out and see. Unlike Thoreau, Dillard has a great variety of books to tempt her indoors. As she admits early on, she is not a scientist; much of what she knows about plants and animals she has learned through reading. The references to reading are endless: "I had read about the giant water bug, but never seen one"; "a book I read when I was young recommended an easy way to find caterpillars to rear"; "I saw color-patches for weeks after I read this wonderful book." Dillard is clearly an insatiable reader, but the reading is not an end in itself. She uses what she reads to direct her gaze, and help her process what she sees.

What Do I Read Next?

• Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854, was Dillard's most important model for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In Walden, Thoreau describes the two years he spent living alone in a cabin on Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, recording his thoughts and his observations of the natural world through the changing seasons.
• Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (1982) is a collection of essays by Dillard. These pieces are similar to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in observing and reflecting on the natural world, but they move beyond Virginia as far away as Ecuador.
• The Writing Life, published in 1989, is Dillard's exploration of her own creative process and search for an understanding of inspiration. She incorporates literal and metaphorical narratives, including the story of how she composed Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
• Terry Tempest Williams' An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field (1995) is a collection of essays about connections between the natural world and our spiritual selves. Most of Williams's essay are set in the American West, and unlike Dillard, she is ever mindful of her place in a human community.
• Another classic work of American nature writing is Henry Beston's 1928 book The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. The book is an account of one year—from autumn to autumn—that Beston spent living alone in a one-room house on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean.

Reading about travel is a guilty pleasure for both writers. Thoreau tells readers that he turned to this kind of reading while he was building his cabin: "I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived." Dillard, too, reads stories of travel and exploration by "Knud Rasmussen, Sir John Franklin, Peter Freuchen, Scott, Peary, and Byrd; Jedediah Smith, Peter Skene Ogden, and Milton Sublette; or Daniel Boone singing on his blanket in the Green River Country." (It seems notable that there are no women on Dillard's list.) But she reads these books in the winter, when there is not much happening outside. Balance is important. It is pleasant to read about going places, but how much better to actually go.

Dillard is nagged by the need to strike this balance. On the one hand, the written word aids in understanding: "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." On the other hand, the very act of committing a sensation to words strips it. Dillard describes the moment of patting the puppy and being in the present, and then realizes, "the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy." She finds any kind of writing irresistible, and even shares a passage from an article about building a snowman, but then wonders, "Why, why in the blue-green world write this sort of thing? Funny written culture, I guess; we pass things on."

Why write things down? An essential question for a writer. One reason is to share information, to pool knowledge. Dillard remarks that "the world is full of creatures that for some reason seem stranger to us than others, and libraries are full of books describing them." But reading is not enough. She continues, "What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings." To learn the names, Dillard consults her books, but to find the meanings she must put them aside.

Dillard never resolves the issue. In "Fecundity," she is as ambivalent as ever about her books. Emotions, she writes, do more harm than good because they cause people to question and challenge and mourn. She proposes a solution, then takes it back: "let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek.… You first." A paragraph later, she repeats the idea of abandoning books: "I must go down to the creek again. It is where I belong, although as I become closer to it, my fellows appear more and more freakish, and my home in the library more and more limited. Imperceptibly at first, and now consciously, I shy away from the arts, from the human emotional stew." Her will is to empty herself of thought and knowledge, to stand empty and ready. But she is a writer; ironically, readers know about her wish to turn away from the written word because she wrote it down.

Historians of nature writing state that this reliance on books is common, and desirable. Richard G. Lillard, in an essay titled "The Nature Book in Action," defines nature writing and the nature writer. He explains that "The nature book is a personal statement, often charmingly literary, told at firsthand by a well-rounded observer who is as much at home in the humanities as in the natural sciences, especially the biological studies.… The nature writer studies both books and nature." Those who come after these writers, who are enriched by reading their works, benefit from the writers' deft balancing act of books and nature. But Thoreau and Dillard help readers see that reading a work of nature writing is an empty exercise, unless it prompts them to get up and go outside.

"This essay is interested in something that binds Thoreau and Dillard together across the span of a hundred years: their lives as readers and writers. Although they believe that people must clear their minds and open their hearts to nature, without interjecting their intellect and their expectations, they turn again and again to books for confirmation or clarification of what they have seen."

Source:

Cynthia Bily, Critical Essay on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in Nonfiction Classics for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

Elaine Tietjen

In the following essay, Tietjen recounts her early impressions of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek along with her experience as a student of Dillard's, then offers a later analysis of Dillard's work.

She stared as if she were about to tell me that she dreamed last night of hanging in space above our blue planet. With her leather jacket, loose wool pants, serious hiking boots, and a collecting pouch slung over her neck, she looked the perfect image of the woodswoman I desperately wanted to become. Her cornsilk hair was lit up like a lamp. Annie Dillard sat on a ledge in a clearing, beckoning the reader to come into her woods. I held her Pulitzer Prize-winning book on my lap in the back of an old bus, headed for Canyonlands.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was one of three books I took into the wilderness for a semester of expeditions in the Rockies. Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire and Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac both waited in my pack. Up until two weeks before, I had never heard of Dillard, but the sheer force of her image on the cover convinced me to buy her book. The cover said Pilgrim was "a mystical excursion into the natural world." So I read it first. I was glad the trip to Utah was a long one; I had to savor each paragraph three or four times and stare out the window at the rolling world, dumbfounded.

Dillard liked to exaggerate, I discovered, but she convinced me to believe her buoyant claims. Here was a power in language I had never heard before from a woman, or from anyone really—a freedom to be wild, deep, outrageous, exposed. Her voice was confident, striding, and then unashamedly silly. Dillard had me to herself for days.

I had enrolled in this outdoor education program to experience the "essence" of wilderness. I wanted an ultimate physical and spiritual baptism, to see if I, like Thoreau, could live deliberately. As I opened Dillard's book I was looking for a like mind and an affirmation that life meant something serious. Surrounded by sixteen fellow students who spent the bus ride comparing beer brands and former girlfriends, I wanted to talk about evolution, plant dispersal, buzzards, sunsets. We were living in alpine meadows, at the base of desert cliffs, in silent caves, on the ridgelines of Wind River peaks—and I needed to exclaim wonder with someone. Annie Dillard hit that deepest chord.

"I wish I could get hold of this country. I wish I could breathe it into my bones," I wrote with pained longing from a cramped position in a wind-whipped tent. It was the late seventies. I had grown up reading Audubon magazine, hiking in the Adirondacks, and attending school assemblies on Earth Day. At college I had just lived for a year in Ecology House—where I finally learned what multi-national corporations did. Wilderness was being destroyed at an alarming rate, I discovered, and few people seemed to care. Hardly anyone had even heard of the Congressional debate over the future of Alaska when I knocked on their doors with a petition in hand. How could human culture survive if we eliminated the very foundation of what made us human? I wanted to experience wilderness before it was too late. I was ready to devote myself to saving it.

It's no wonder that Dillard's apparent "visionary naturalism" (to quote one critic) became a kind of intellectual template for me. Dillard went into the natural world to SEE, the way children and adults blind from birth with cataracts, and given sight through a special operation, suddenly could see the world for the first time. They found it either horrifying or beautiful. Dillard wanted to see the world freshly, as if for the first time—a flat plane of "color patches" raw and real—the world unfiltered by human senses, untrammeled by human meaning.

Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: "This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is."

Undaunted by this information, Dillard set out to observe the universe as it really is. Both scientist and poet, she wrestled with the spiritual underpinnings of each field, gathering information by the armload to sort into colorful patterns. She was an explorer and stalker, she tells us, determined to discover the meaning of life—or rather, of suffering, pain, and death, for these are the phenomena that do not make coherent sense. Dillard wanted to get below and around human perceptual limitations. She would have liked to see God in the face if she could do so without dying.

On a first reading of Pilgrim, I identified with Dillard's brave explorations. Life is rough, she seemed to say, and the world unfair and insane; all creatures suffer; we're all in this together. She was willing to grant that the rest of life besides us humans mattered. She quoted John Cowper Powys, who said, "We have no reason for denying to the world of plants a certain slow, dim, vague, large, leisurely semiconsciousness." Dillard added, "The patch of bluets in the grass may not be long on brains, but it might be, at least in a very small way, awake."

This writer was a keen observer, and a collector of incredible facts. Through her eyes natural history came alive for me. I was a biology student who wrote poetry; Dillard seemed to be a poet who conducted experiments on life. She waited on the bridge for hours to catch a glimpse of a muskrat. She stuffed praying mantis egg-cases in her pockets and attached them to a bush outside her window where she would be sure to see them hatch. She tried to untie a snakeskin; chased grasshoppers; shouted into the cliffs to see if the echo would disturb a bee foraging at her elbow.

All of life was worth noticing to Dillard because any piece of it could lead to revelation. The natural world, if we could only perceive it as it really is, would provide us with a door into mystery.

Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

This was the way I had been struck, too, I exclaimed to myself, one night in the mountains when I had perched on a rock mid-stream and stared at the stars until I could actually see the distances between them, and could feel the earth turn under me, a round speck I rode through a vast reality usually ignored. Dillard, "the arrowshaft," went purposefully in life, seeking and readying herself for such moments of revelation. It was up to us, she exhorted by example or directive, to be seekers and look for the world's meaning. She looked on faith and expected meaning to be real—on faith and on the non-rational knowledge of having seen the tree with the lights in it. Her seeking led her to eventually hold horror in one hand, beauty in the other, and to give thanks for all of it; she exits the book with her left foot saying "Glory" and her right foot "Amen": "in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise."

I remember closing the book with reverence, breathless myself, convinced that I was parting from a soul-mate. Surely, I thought, if we were to meet, oh surely we would become the closest of friends. I could not have guessed then how wrong I was, and how young.

The following fall I returned to college for my senior year. Standing outside the English office, inspecting the schedule of new courses taped to the door, I nearly exploded with adrenaline when I read "A. Dillard." Rushing to my house, I called Dillard immediately to ask her to be my advisor for an honors project I had just that minute created. We had a long talk, at the end of which she flatly refused, having inquired why in the world I would want to write about environmental problems when "it's been done before." The encounter deflated me for weeks.

The next semester I was on the class list for Dillard's "Writing Poetry" course. It proved to be one of the most hypnotizing and frustrating I had as an undergraduate. At one point Dillard admitted that she would have called the course "Writing and Living Poetry"—"this class is really about writing as a way of life," she said. "You must turn away from the pleasure of being one of the people of the world. The mission of endeavor is more important than the pleasure of life." If we had a choice, she asked us, of going to Afghanistan or reading in the library, which should we do? I thought of her forays onto the island in Tinker Creek. I thought of her standing on the bridge over the creek one summer in a hurricane while the flood waters swirled a few inches below her feet. I thought of her longing to go "northing"—to see the caribou for herself perhaps, hear their hoof joints clicking. Of course, I thought, GO, I would go. "The library," she said.

"Looking so closely at eternity, Dillard was torn between beauty and horror throughout her 'mystical excursion' in Pilgrim. The logos force compelled her to explore, analyze, and question the meaning of existence, and eventually to write a reasoning book."

When Dillard first walked into that classroom I had been struck by how young she looked—too young to have absorbed so much wisdom. Her hair was long and loose like many of the young women in the class. She was soft-skinned but put a hard set in her jaw when she wanted to. She liked to wear hats. She talked about softball. She liked to smoke at the head of the wide rectangular conference table around which we thirty students sat, and willingly, I forgave her. She remained distant and private about her own life, and devoted herself to the class. She was tough, demanding: every poem came back with comments all over it. In the margins of mine she admonished me to "eschew sentimentality." By the middle of the semester I finally got the hang of her all-encompassing definition for that oft-repeated word—anything that had been done before: anything that came too easily; anything that borrowed its power from the world, instead of creating its own; anything that was too comfortable, that did not dare and plunge.

One day she asked how many of us would be writing poems ten years from now. The week before we had heard, "The people who are accomplishing things are the people sitting in their rooms missing life." Most of the hands in the room went up. She was surprised; her eyes softened a bit. "Good for you," I think she said. The look on her face was pained, pleased, worried—writing mattered too much. I think we made her day. I think we made her anxious.

Confronted each week by such declarations, I soon wondered what had happened to the woodswoman I had first met. Hadn't she stalked a coot all of one afternoon, listened to insects, attained a glorious moment while patting a puppy? Her classroom directives for a strict intellectualism did not fit the sense-based "experiential" image I had of her from the book. In an interview with Mike Major for America in 1978, Dillard set the record straight: "… people want to make you into a cult figure because of what they fancy to be your life style, when the truth is your life is literature! You're writing consciously, off of hundreds of index cards, often distorting the literal truth to achieve an artistic one … [People] think it happens in a dream, that you just sit on a tree stump and take dictation from some little chipmunk!"

My new role model appeared progressively more disciplined, more severe, and more driven than I would have guessed from reading Pilgrim, but she was no environmentalist. One day she commented that she didn't see how any of us would want to be vegetarians; it took too much time away from writing to cook that stuff. She showed no allegiance to any political causes that I could detect. Her sole cause was Meaning and Art.

We budding poets learned that our purpose was to take the whole world as material and bend it to make Art. Art objects had to cohere, with every part utterly clear and the meanings interconnected. Even if the intent was to portray the meaninglessness of the world, the artist did it "the usual way, the old way, by creating a self-relevant artistic whole," by imposing "a strict order upon chaos," wrote Dillard in Living by Fiction, a book she was working on while teaching our class. "In this structural unity lies integrity, and it is integrity which separates art from nonart."

Pilgrim is a non-fiction work with fiction in it. Its author sought the integrity of the very world, and so blurred her own distinction between art and nonart. One expectation behind many of her questions in this book is that life should behave coherently. Conscious observant seeking should reveal the world to be an art object itself—unified, ordered, and resplendent. But the chaotic world resists the attempt to impose order on it, presenting instead raw pain, illogical death, and suffering. Thus, the world she sees engenders Dillard's ever more determined struggle to find Reason at the foundation of life.

Artistic energy in a work is derived from the material, instructed this teacher. You need real objects in the real world to write successfully, but writing, ultimately, is about something abstract. For Dillard, the relationship between time and eternity stimulated her work. "I've devoted my life to trying to figure this out," she said, implying that each of us in the class should find an equally worthy goal and stick to it fiercely as a life project.

Looking so closely at eternity, Dillard was torn between beauty and horror throughout her "mystical excursion" in Pilgrim. The logos force compelled her to explore, analyze, and question the meaning of existence, and eventually to write a reasoning book. Logos also, necessarily, divided her from the very world she sought, while the force of eros compelled her toward integration. Pilgrim is Dillard's effort to find a balance point between reason and intuition, classification and unification. As an art work, the book rings and reverberates with its own energy—but can the inner light of mystical knowledge manifest into words on a page? Pilgrim records the attempt, but cannot validly represent Nature itself, for the author tips the balance in favor of logos. One could say, as did Kabir, a fifteenth-century poet (quoted by Lewis Hyde in The Gift) that "… all our diseases/are in the asking of these questions." Dillard remains too focused on her own idiosyncratic life projects to achieve a convincing epiphany by the end of her book. Although many readers admire her as both a naturalist and a mystic, she is primarily, fundamentally, an artist, and the core of her book is not about the whole of Nature, but only one small part—Pilgrim is about human beings.

Dillard immediately interprets every one of her observations in spiritual terms, in relation to human life. The "tree with the lights in it" represents spiritual revelation at its finest. The collapsed body of the frog eaten by a giant water bug becomes Dillard's refrain for suffering and insane death. The Polyphemous moth reappears again and again—it hatched in a jar in young Dillard's classroom and could not spread its beautiful wings to dry. Released an hour later, the crippled insect crawled down the school driveway at Dillard's feet. She never forgot its crumpled useless wings, and the moth crawls into her narrative in Pilgrim repeatedly to symbolize the part we humans play in the fabric of nature's horror. The creek—to whose side Dillard's house is clamped like an "anchor-hold"—is "continuous creation"—pure energy, flux, the rush of the future and the promise of rebirth, while the mountains hold up eternity: "Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given". Dillard uses all the elements of her landscapes to search for God, just as she uses the library. The natural world is itself a text. This pilgrim uses Nature as a bridge to a direct relationship with God, following a long tradition of American nature writers, it is true, but failing to free herself from her own personality in her search. Dillard did not escape her perceptual filtering systems, and in some ways, she did not try to escape them. Some danger lies in taking this work as a model for natural history or metaphysical explorations, since it offers a specifically human-centered view of reality.

Dillard actually went out into the natural world to learn about her own unwilling role in the cycles of horror. This is the darker side of Thoreau and Melville that Dillard bravely explores, but she does not go quite far enough. This road can only lead to the embrace of paradox. On a first reading, under the huge skies of the Rockies, I was convinced that Dillard had found Meaning by the end of the book, as she sways with confidence, clasping beauty and horror together in thanksgiving. Reading Pilgrim again, I have to wonder whether her quest had actually ended—or did the book simply need finishing? Her exultations seem forced—an intellectually conscious construction, a loud shouting to drown out the tremendous fear that still tips the balance.

Other critics have noted Dillard's unusual focus on the particular as a path toward the universal. In fact, this focus also limited her. She insisted on seeing creatures and plants as individuals with identities that are bounded by their skins or shells or coats. But this way of seeing overlooks some basic lessons of ecology. Individuals often do not matter in the network of energy exchanges as much as do whole systems. Is this necessarily a horrifying idea? Perhaps it is, if it threatens the human ego's sense of identity and autonomy. Horror here is an artifact of the drive to differentiate the world into parts. The patterns that might really be operating in the world do not carry as much weight as the chaos Dillard chose to perceive. Life ought to make sense, she asserted, the way it makes sense to us.

Even though revelatory experiences succeed in dissolving the ego completely, if only for a brief moment, Dillard could not maintain the vision of the tree with the lights in it. Near the end of the book, she hoists herself out of despondency by focusing on a particular maple key seed, a symbol of renewal:

Hullo. I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents …, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit which bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down. O maple key, I thought, I must confess I thought, o welcome, cheers.

But a little later she is gone again into the dark:

The waters of separation, however lightly sprinkled, leave indelible stains. Did you think, before you were caught, that you needed, say, life? Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love? But no. Your needs are all met. But not as the world giveth. You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned that the outrageous guarantee holds. You see the creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you're gone. You have finally understood that you're dealing with a maniac.

At times, Dillard's outward seeking attention led her to moments of truth. She saw the tree with the lights in it, or a monarch butterfly climbing a hill by coasting, or some other miracle of affirmation. But she never fully considered that the horrors she perceived might reflect her Self. Logos keeps us within the confines of our own minds, while eros breaks us out. Italo Calvino wrote, in The Uses of Literature, that "The power of modern literature lies in its willingness to give a voice to what has remained unexpressed in the social or individual unconscious: this is the gauntlet it throws down time and again. The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts. Dreams of progress and reason are haunted by nightmares."

Could it be that many of Dillard's awestruck fears in confronting the alien world of insects come from her own unresolved experiences in her unconscious? Dillard's own sorts of ghosts rise up in nearly every chapter, most frequently in the bodies of insects who do "one horrible thing after another." In her recently published memoir, An American Childhood, Dillard described several incidents that had enormous emotional and psychological power over her. One day a dead, dried butterfly fell out from between the pages of a book she was reading. The wings and body crumbled to bits that slipped under her shirt and stuck to her chest. One day she returned home from summer vacation to discover a carrion beetle still alive in her insect collection box. Stuck through with a pin, it had been swimming in the air for days. The contribution she made to the crippling of the Polyphemous moth had haunted her ever since. Dillard's unusual obsession with the horrors of the alien lives of insects could be, in part, an effort to accommodate the dark side of her own psyche. Is the terror that she faces the terror of nightmares rather than a directly perceived external reality? Perhaps the darker side of God, the face he will not show us, hides a uniquely human image.

I used to kill insects with carbon tetrachloride—cleaning fluid vapor—and pin them in cigar boxes, labeled, in neat rows. That was many years ago: I quit when one day I opened a cigar box lid and saw a carrion beetle, staked down high between its wing covers, trying to crawl, swimming on its pin. It was dancing with its own shadow, untouching, and had been for days. If I go downstairs now will I see a possum just rounding a corner, trailing its scaled pink tail? I know that one night, in just this sort of rattling wind, I will go to the kitchen for milk and find on the back of the stove a sudden stew I never fixed, bubbling, with a deer leg sticking out.

As much as Dillard insists that she focuses on the world, her witty, jerking, twisting, or joking language frequently draws attention to herself. Dillard's portrait on the cover of Pilgrim was not entirely out of place, since she so often serves as subject as well as author of her book. Dillard the artist brings these "horror-show" images together; Dillard the poet makes the point.

Spiritual seeking and mystical experiences have been recorded and discussed for centuries. Dillard does not have much that is new to say about revelation, although her path, that focuses on the particular and the alien, is somewhat new. Her overriding concern with structured meaning and coherent integrity leads her more easily to her ego Self than to the gate of the raw universe.

In Living by Fiction Dillard wonders, "Do artists discover order, or invent it? Do they discern it, or make it up?" In Pilgrim, the question of whether Meaning is absolute seems urgent, for our very sanity might depend on the answer. We can explain the horrors of the world either because the God that made the world is a monster and our own ordered minds are freaks, or because the horrors are themselves projections or reflections of a Mind that is a monster in an ordered universe.

Although this woods explorer poses both sides of the question in Pilgrim, she addresses them unequally. More ready and willing to call God a maniac and the world insane, she resists abandoning her own ego to consider that life may not Mean in the way we human beings assume it to mean. Afraid to redefine her understanding of beauty, she asks, as might each of us, "Or is beauty itself an intricately fashioned lure, the cruelest hoax of all?". She recounts an Eskimo tale in which an ugly old woman kills her beautiful daughter and skins the daughter's face to wear as a mask, so as to fool her daughter's husband into sleeping with her. "Could it be that if I climbed the dome of heaven and scrabbled and clutched at the beautiful cloth till I loaded my fists with a wrinkle to pull, that the mask would rip away to reveal a toothless old ugly, eyes glazed with delight?" To revive herself from this tug of horror Dillard again focuses on the outer "real" world:

A wind rose, quickening; it seemed at the same instant to invade my nostrils and vibrate my gut. I stirred and lifted my head. No, I've gone through this a million times, beauty is not a hoax—how many days have I learned not to stare at the back of my hand when I could look out at the creek? Come on, I say to the creek, surprise me; and it does, with each new drop. Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it. Waste and extravagance go together up and down the banks, all along the intricate fringe of spirit's free incursions into time. On either side of me the creek snared and kept the sky's distant lights, shaped them into shifting substance and bore them speckled down.

To see beauty as pure energy flung alongside time, one has to escape one's sense of self; one has to swim in the wild, free, crazy, shifting creek. Dillard cannot stay there—perhaps none of us can. But we might come closer to seeing Meaning consistently if we were to step outside of the anthropomorphic framework Dillard assumes. Her insistence that the parts of the world fit misleads the reader, intentionally or not, into regarding the natural world as a forum for human Idea. The world can be taken and used in our art works, but the world remains mysterious, completely autonomous from that art.

Reading Pilgrim again, I am still swept by Dillard's nimble language, by her wit and curiosity, by her sheer boldness to expose her fears, and by her intense driven vision. But I am also unsatisfied. Dillard's god is too profoundly human. She expects a Him of some kind, related to her in some way, operating out of rationality. I do not feel the horror she does when considering how a female dragonfly consumes its mate, for instance—I am fascinated. This precise behavior may have made the species better able to adapt. Dillard's horror is misplaced, for if life, like all matter, is simply made of light energy, then the particular forms life takes are not as significant as the flow of energy life participates in. Creatures consume other creatures; energy changes and transforms. Quite likely, the dragonfly does not experience death in the way that we would. The dragonfly's death may not make sense on the level of the individual, but on the level of the community or the biosphere such a death may be quite beautiful. So, too, might a human death be beautiful, if it can be perceived as a transformation to another form. This idea, of course, is the ultimate challenge of faith, and the foundation of knowledge for mystics. We are all part of a pattern larger than we can ever see, more complex than we can rationally comprehend. What if the Meaning of it all—the ultimate pattern of the universe—is not discernible in human terms? What if the Meaning requires that we abandon our "human-ness" to understand it, or accept that it can never be expressed in rational words? For all her bravery, Dillard seems to resist this question, perceiving Nature as a collection of discrete parts that ought to illuminate her own life. In a world rapidly becoming dominated and destroyed by human needs and rational human meaning, it may be time to consider the human mind as the monster.

To allow for the possibility of an ultimate or absolute pattern in the universe, we should make an effort to leap outside of the limitations of rational perception. It is not simply a matter of seeing "color patches" in a flat plane. It may require us to abandon the notion of the sanctity of the "individual" above all else. Simplifying the reality of the natural world by disconnecting its interlocking parts will not lead to Truth. At her revelatory moments in Pilgrim, Dillard understands this, but a good deal of the book reveals her ego's attempt to come to terms with its own destruction. The ultimate pattern of the universe—whatever it may be—seems to insist on such a dissolution.

People who come to this book, as I did originally, looking for an ecology of perception, will misread Pilgrim. Dillard sometimes too consciously exploits the natural world for her own artistic purposes. Today, in the late eighties, we need to consider more than humanly defined identity in our efforts to seek wisdom.

Interestingly, the authors of the other two books I carried to Canyonlands offer quite different ethical views of Nature. In Dessert Solitaire, Edward Abbey tells us he is not writing about the desert: "The desert is a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea. Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite. If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree.… Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than as material." Dillard uses Tinker Creek as medium also, but doesn't admit to this as clearly.

Abbey foresees that he will be criticized for dealing "too much with mere appearances, with the surface of things," and for failing "to engage and reveal the patterns of unifying relationships which form the true underlying reality of existence." To this idea he responds: "Here I must confess I know nothing whatever about true underlying reality, having never met any." Abbey shies away from calling himself a mystic. He regards the world from a biocentric point-of-view—the natural world has intrinsic value wholly apart from its relationship to us. If this desert lover had to make a choice between killing a rare wildflower or killing a man, he probably would choose the man—or so he says.

In contrast, Aldo Leopold embodies another sort of vision, one that in my mind provides a more ethically coherent framework for a perception of the true "reality" of the natural world. In Sand County Almanac, the former forester proposes a Land Ethic based on the value of a whole system, including human beings. "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." This is an ecocentric perspective, and it is also holistic because it does not perceive the world as composed of discrete parts. Isn't this view, in so many words, the essence of mystical wisdom also? Leopold is considered by many the founder of environmental ethics, having successfully combined the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century naturalists with the rational knowledge of twentieth-century ecological sciences.

Life cannot be divided into parts at any level really, whether cell, organism, species, population, or community. Dillard persists in seeing horror because she insists on focusing on the particular too closely. She divides and separates and catalogues, and seems to forget that she has reduced her field of vision, and so perceives the horror as the real, the raw stuff of the universe.

Leopold may have had a better footing in addressing the question of whether artists perceive meaning, or make it up. Dillard tried to perceive meaning based on the existence of individual, discrete egocentric lives. Leopold said: "The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not. He knows that the biotic mechanism is so complex that its workings may never be fully understood." Leopold proposed a shift in consciousness. When considering the human use of wilderness areas, he suggested that "Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind."

At moments, Dillard succeeds in dissolving her Mind's autonomy to perceive the patterns of which she is a part. At these moments, Pilgrims remains a gripping book, nearly accomplishing the impossible task of transmitting in words an experience that is outside logical processes, independent of time, and impenetrable by reason. For this effort on her part, I still close the book with reverence. Pilgrim is not a dangerous book—if the reader understands that the natural world portrayed in it is more a vision of a human mind, limited, self-focused, and filtering, than of the universe. We may yet find that it is human meaning that does not make sense. We may discover that the natural world is not here as a bridge for us, that our personal journeys are part of a pattern we will never fully comprehend.

Source:

Elaine Tietjen, "Perceptions of Nature: Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," in North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 3, Summer 1988, pp. 101-13.

Sources

Carruth, Hayden, "Attractions and Dangers of Nostalgia," in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 50, Autumn 1974, p. 640.

Hoffman, Eva, "Solitude," in Commentary, Vol. 58, October 1974, p. 87.

Lillard, Richard G., "The Nature Book in Action," in Teaching Environmental Literature: Materials, Methods, Resources, edited by Frederick O. Waage, Modern Language Association of America, 1985, p. 36.

McClintock, James I., "'Pray Without Ceasing': Annie Dillard among the Nature Writers," in Earthly Words: Essays on Contemporary American Nature and Environmental Writers, edited by John Cooley, University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp. 69, 85.

McIlroy, Gary, " Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the Social Legacy of Walden," in Earthly Words: Essays on Contemporary American Nature and Environmental Writers, edited by John Cooley, University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 100.

Norwood, Vera L., "Heroines of Nature: Four Women Respond to the American Landscape," in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, University of Georgia Press, 1996, pp. 325-26.

Parrish, Nancy C., Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers, Louisiana State University Press, 1998, p. 124.

Reimer, Margaret Loewen, "The Dialectical Vision of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," in Critique, Vol. 24, No. 3, Spring 1983, pp. 182-91.

Smith, Linda L., Annie Dillard, Twayne, 1991, p. 42.

Tallmadge, John, "Beyond the Excursion: Initiatory Themes in Annie Dillard and Terry Tempest Williams," in Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment, edited by Michael P. Branch, Rochelle Johnson, Daniel Patterson, and Scott Slovic, University of Idaho Press, 1998, p. 197.

Thoreau, Henry David, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Dover Thrift, 1995, pp. 65-67, 72.

Welty, Eudora, Review in New York Times Book Review, March 24, 1974, p. 4.

Further Reading

McClintock, James I., "'Pray Without Ceasing': Annie Dillard among the Nature Writers," in Earthly Words: Essays on Contemporary American Nature and Environmental Writers, edited by John Cooley, University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp. 69-86.

In this brief essay, McClintock locates two of Dillard's books, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm, within the tradition of American nature writing, focusing on the religious elements of her writing.

Norwood, Vera L., "Heroines of Nature: Four Women Respond to the American Landscape," in Environmental Review: An International Journal of History and the Humanities, Vol. 8, Spring 1984, pp. 23-31.

Norwood traces the differences between men's and women's nature writing in the United States, claiming that while men seek to dominate and conquer the landscape, women tend to embrace and defend it. This article examines writings by Dillard, Rachel Carson, Isabella Bird, and Mary Austin.

Parrish, Nancy L., Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers, Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

Parrish explores the work and lives of a remarkable group of women writers who attended Hollins College in Virginia in the early 1970s. In a chapter entitled "Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," she tells some of the stories behind the writing and reveals more intimate personal information than Dillard gives in her own autobiographical works.

Radford, Dawn Evans, "Annie Dillard: A Bibliographical Survey," in Bulletin of Bibliography, Vol. 51, No. 2, June 1994, pp. 181-94.

Radford provides an overview of Dillard's career and of the central issues addressed by critics of her work, followed by an annotated bibliography of nearly two hundred of the most important primary and secondary works. Radford's annotations are succinct and substantive, making this bibliography invaluable for research.

Smith, Linda L., Annie Dillard, Twayne's United States Authors Series, 1987.

Smith's overview is an excellent starting place for students who wish to learn more about Dillard's life and work. In jargon-free and engaging prose, it presents a brief biography, a chapter about each of Dillard's major books, a chronology of important dates, and an annotated bibliography.

Tietjen, Elaine, "Perceptions of Nature: Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" in the North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 3, Summer 1988, pp. 101-13.

Tietjen gives a personal response to her reading of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, comparing Dillard's reactions to the natural world with her own. Tietjen also had the opportunity to take a class taught by Dillard. She attempts in this essay to make sense of the differences between her idealized conception of Dillard and the real woman and to move beyond her first awestruck reading of the work.