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Three by Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, The Writing Life
One of the most distinctive voices in American letters today. --Boston Globe
A stunning collection of Annie Dillard's most popular books in one volume.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek took American letters by storm when it was published in 1974, winning the Pulitzer Prize, the accolades of the critics, and over the years hundreds of thousands of devoted readers. It was followed by many more books by Annie Dillard, two of which, An American Childhood and The Writing Life, became national bestsellers and cemented Dillard's reputation as one of our national literary treasures.
A stunning collection of Annie Dillard's most popular books in one volume.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek took American letters by storm when it was published in 1974, winning the Pulitzer Prize, the accolades of the critics, and over the years hundreds of thousands of devoted readers. It was followed by many more books by Annie Dillard, two of which, An American Childhood and The Writing Life, became national bestsellers and cemented Dillard's reputation as one of our national literary treasures.
617 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
75 people are currently reading
1381 people want to read
About the author
Annie Dillard
61 books2,876 followersAnnie Dillard is an American author celebrated for her distinctive narrative voice in both fiction and nonfiction, as well as for her work in poetry, essays, literary criticism, novels, and memoir. She gained wide recognition with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a meditative exploration of nature and perception that received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and established her as a major literary figure. Raised in Pittsburgh, her formative years were marked by wide reading, close observation of the natural world, and a family environment that encouraged curiosity and wit, experiences later reflected in her memoir An American Childhood. She studied English, theology, and creative writing at Hollins College, where her academic engagement with writers such as Henry David Thoreau shaped her intellectual direction. Dillard’s work often blends spiritual inquiry, philosophy, and close attention to the physical world, drawing comparisons to writers such as Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson. Her books include Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk, The Writing Life, For the Time Being, and the novels The Living and The Maytrees, the latter a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award. Alongside her writing career, she taught for more than two decades in the English department at Wesleyan University, influencing generations of students before retiring as Professor Emerita. Her work has been translated widely, adapted into other art forms, and honored with numerous awards, including the National Humanities Medal, affirming her lasting impact on American letters.
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November 17, 2015
Totally cheating, I just wanted to fit more quotes from Pilgrim here.
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. And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque, so much black asphalt.
I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your love in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia.
That I ended this experience prematurely for myself-that I drew scales over my eyes and gloved my hand between me and the puppy-is not the only point. After all, it would have ended anyway. I’ve never seen a sunset or felt a wind that didn’t. The levitating saints came down at last, and their two feet bore real weight. No the point is that not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions, we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
Stephen Graham, in the Gentle Art of Tramping, wrote, “And as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.” That great door opens on the present, illuminates it as with a multitude of flashing torches.
I had thought, because I had seen the tree with the lights in it, that the great door, by definition, opens on eternity. Now that I have ‘patted the puppy’-now that I have experienced the present purely through my senses- I discover that, although the door to the tree with the lights in it was opened from eternity, as it were, and shone on that tree eternal lights, it nevertheless opened on the real and present cedar. It opened on time…
Seeing the tree with the lights in it was an experience vastly different in quality as well as import from patting the puppy. On that cedar tree shone, however, briefly, the steady, inward flames of eternity; across the mountain by the gas station raced the familiar flames of the falling sun. But on both occasions, I thought, with rising exultation, this is it, this is it; praise the lord; praise the land. Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people- the novelist’s world, not the poet’s. I’ve lived there. I remember what the city has to offer; human companionship, major league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. 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.” Innocence is a better world.
Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough, and time. Innocence is not the prerogative of infants and puppies, and far less of mountains and fixed stars, which have no prerogatives at all. It is not lost to us; the world is a better place than that. Like any other of the spirit’s good gifts, it is there if you want it, free for the asking, as has been stressed by stronger words than mine. It is possible to pursue innocence as hounds pursue hares; singlemindledly, driven by a kind of love, crashing over creeks, keening and lost in fields and forests, circling, vaulting over hedges and hills wide-eyed, giving loud tongue all unawares to the deepest, most incomprehensible longing, a root-flame in the heart, and that warbling chorus resounding back from the mountains, hurling itself from ridge to ridge over the valley, now faint, now clear ringing the air through which the hounds tear, open-mouthed, the echoes of their own wails dimly knocking in their lungs.
What I call innocence is the spirit’s unselfconscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration. One needn’t be, shouldn’t be reduced to a puppy. If you wish to tell me that the city offers galleries, I’ll pour you a drink and enjoy your company while it lasts; but I’ll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river, up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away. These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated. Living is moving’ time is a live creek bearing changing lights. As I move, or as the world moves around me, the fullness of what I see shatters. “Last forever!” Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless.
I like the slants of light; I’m a collector. There is a good one, that bit of bank there, that patch of light from the creek on the bark.
But there is more to the present than a series of snapshots. We are not merely sensitized film; we have feelings, a memory for information and an eidetic memory for the imagery of our pasts.
Our layered consciousness is a tiered track for an unmatched assortment of concentrically wound reels. Each one plays out for all of life its dazzle and blur of translucent shadow-pictures; each one hums at every moment its own secret melody in its own unique key. We tune in and out. But moments are not lost. Time out of mind is time nevertheless, cumulative, informing the present. From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt- older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath.
But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We keep waking from a dream we can’t recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees.
I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can’t think about them. I live with trees. There are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and in addition, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down, shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach.
Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore.
You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captions, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe.
“He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.
And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved.
What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun’s surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet, the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the sweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral. Lick a finger; feel the now.
Spring is seeping north, towards me and away from me, at sixteen miles a day. Along estuary banks of tidal rivers all over the world, snails in black cluster like currants are gliding up and down the stems of reed and sedge, migrating every moment with the dip and swing of tides. Behind me, Tinker Mountain is eroding one thousandth of an inch a year. The sharks I saw are roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need new water pushed into their gills; they need dance. Somewhere east of me, on another continent, it is sunset, and starlings in breathtaking bands are winding high in the sky to their evening roost. The mantis egg cases are tied to the mock-orange hedge; within each case, within each egg, cells elongate, narrow, and split; cells bubble and curve inward, align, harden or hollow or stretch. And where are you now?
Live water heals memories. I look up the creek and here it comes, the future, being borne aloft as on a winding succession of laden trays. You may wake and look from the window and breathe the real air, and say, with satisfaction or longing, “This is it.” But if you look up the creek, if you look up in the creek in any weather, your spirit fills, and you are saying, with an exulting rise of the lungs, “Here it comes!”
Here it comes. In the far distance I can see the concrete bridge where the road crosses the creek. Under the bridge and beyond it the water is flat and silent, blued by distance and stilled by depth. It is so much sky, a fallen shred caught in the cleft of banks. But it pours. The channel here is straight as an arrow; grace is itself an archer. Between the dangling wands of bankside willows, and Osage orange, I see the creek pour down. It spills toward me streaming over a series of sandstone tiers, down and down, and down. I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.
It is sheer coincidence that my hunk of the creek is strewn with boulders. I never merited this grace, that when I face upstream I scent the virgin breath of mountains, I feel a spray of mist on my cheeks and lips, I hear a ceaseless splash and susurrus, a sound of water not merely poured smoothly down air to fill a stead pool, but tumbling live about, over, under, around, between, though an intricate speckling of rock. It is sheer coincidence that upstream from me the creek’s bed is ridged in horizontal croppings of sandstone. I never merited this grace, that when I face upstream I see the light on the water careening towards me, inevitably, freely, down a graded series of terraces like the balanced winged platforms on infinite, inexhaustible font. “Ho, if you are thirsty, come down to the water; ho if you are hungry, come sit and eat.” This is the present, at last. This is the now , this flickering, broken light, this air that the wind of the future presses down my throat, pumping me buoyant giddy with praise.
My god, I look at the creek. It is the answer to Merton’s prayer, “Give us time!” It never stops. If I seek the senses and skills of children, the information of a thousand books, the innocence of puppies, even the insights of my own city past, I do so only, solely, entirely that I might look well at the creek. You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. You’ll have fish left over. The creek is the one great giver.
Here is the word from a subatomic physicist: “everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves.” Let me twist his meaning. Here it comes. The particles are broken; the waves are translucent, laving, roiling with beauty like sharks. The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources, the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.
Some reputable scientists, even today, are not wholly satisfied with the notion that the song of birds is strictly and solely a territorial claim. It’s an important point. We’ve been on earth all these years and we still don’t know for certain why birds sing. We need someone to unlock the code to the foreign language and give us the key; we need a new Rosetta stone.
Today I watched and heard a wren, a sparrow, and the mockingbird sing. My brain started to trill, why why why, what is the meaning meaning meaning? It’s not that they know something we don’t; we know much more than they do, and surely they don’t even know why they sing. No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singling. If the mockingbird were chirping to give us the long-sought formulae for a unified field theory, the point would be only slightly less irrelevant. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? The question is there since I take it as given as I have said, that beauty is something objectively performed- the tree that falls in the forest- having being externally, stumbled across, or missed, as real and present as both sides of the moon…If the lyric is simply, mine mine mine, then why the extravagance of the score? It has the liquid, intricate sound of every creek’s tumble over every configuration of rock creek-bottom in the country. Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code. And it could be that for beauty there is no key, that it will never make sense in our language but only in its own, and that we need to start all over again, on a new continent, learning the strange syllables one by one.
I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are.
I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. I’ve learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. I’ve read books; I’ve gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…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 and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems.
So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible face about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one…. The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.
You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?
You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted- just a replica- it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them in clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex?” When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella.
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. And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque, so much black asphalt.
I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your love in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia.
That I ended this experience prematurely for myself-that I drew scales over my eyes and gloved my hand between me and the puppy-is not the only point. After all, it would have ended anyway. I’ve never seen a sunset or felt a wind that didn’t. The levitating saints came down at last, and their two feet bore real weight. No the point is that not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions, we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
Stephen Graham, in the Gentle Art of Tramping, wrote, “And as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.” That great door opens on the present, illuminates it as with a multitude of flashing torches.
I had thought, because I had seen the tree with the lights in it, that the great door, by definition, opens on eternity. Now that I have ‘patted the puppy’-now that I have experienced the present purely through my senses- I discover that, although the door to the tree with the lights in it was opened from eternity, as it were, and shone on that tree eternal lights, it nevertheless opened on the real and present cedar. It opened on time…
Seeing the tree with the lights in it was an experience vastly different in quality as well as import from patting the puppy. On that cedar tree shone, however, briefly, the steady, inward flames of eternity; across the mountain by the gas station raced the familiar flames of the falling sun. But on both occasions, I thought, with rising exultation, this is it, this is it; praise the lord; praise the land. Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people- the novelist’s world, not the poet’s. I’ve lived there. I remember what the city has to offer; human companionship, major league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. 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.” Innocence is a better world.
Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough, and time. Innocence is not the prerogative of infants and puppies, and far less of mountains and fixed stars, which have no prerogatives at all. It is not lost to us; the world is a better place than that. Like any other of the spirit’s good gifts, it is there if you want it, free for the asking, as has been stressed by stronger words than mine. It is possible to pursue innocence as hounds pursue hares; singlemindledly, driven by a kind of love, crashing over creeks, keening and lost in fields and forests, circling, vaulting over hedges and hills wide-eyed, giving loud tongue all unawares to the deepest, most incomprehensible longing, a root-flame in the heart, and that warbling chorus resounding back from the mountains, hurling itself from ridge to ridge over the valley, now faint, now clear ringing the air through which the hounds tear, open-mouthed, the echoes of their own wails dimly knocking in their lungs.
What I call innocence is the spirit’s unselfconscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration. One needn’t be, shouldn’t be reduced to a puppy. If you wish to tell me that the city offers galleries, I’ll pour you a drink and enjoy your company while it lasts; but I’ll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river, up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away. These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated. Living is moving’ time is a live creek bearing changing lights. As I move, or as the world moves around me, the fullness of what I see shatters. “Last forever!” Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless.
I like the slants of light; I’m a collector. There is a good one, that bit of bank there, that patch of light from the creek on the bark.
But there is more to the present than a series of snapshots. We are not merely sensitized film; we have feelings, a memory for information and an eidetic memory for the imagery of our pasts.
Our layered consciousness is a tiered track for an unmatched assortment of concentrically wound reels. Each one plays out for all of life its dazzle and blur of translucent shadow-pictures; each one hums at every moment its own secret melody in its own unique key. We tune in and out. But moments are not lost. Time out of mind is time nevertheless, cumulative, informing the present. From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt- older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath.
But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We keep waking from a dream we can’t recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees.
I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can’t think about them. I live with trees. There are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and in addition, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down, shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach.
Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore.
You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captions, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe.
“He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.
And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved.
What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun’s surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet, the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the sweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral. Lick a finger; feel the now.
Spring is seeping north, towards me and away from me, at sixteen miles a day. Along estuary banks of tidal rivers all over the world, snails in black cluster like currants are gliding up and down the stems of reed and sedge, migrating every moment with the dip and swing of tides. Behind me, Tinker Mountain is eroding one thousandth of an inch a year. The sharks I saw are roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need new water pushed into their gills; they need dance. Somewhere east of me, on another continent, it is sunset, and starlings in breathtaking bands are winding high in the sky to their evening roost. The mantis egg cases are tied to the mock-orange hedge; within each case, within each egg, cells elongate, narrow, and split; cells bubble and curve inward, align, harden or hollow or stretch. And where are you now?
Live water heals memories. I look up the creek and here it comes, the future, being borne aloft as on a winding succession of laden trays. You may wake and look from the window and breathe the real air, and say, with satisfaction or longing, “This is it.” But if you look up the creek, if you look up in the creek in any weather, your spirit fills, and you are saying, with an exulting rise of the lungs, “Here it comes!”
Here it comes. In the far distance I can see the concrete bridge where the road crosses the creek. Under the bridge and beyond it the water is flat and silent, blued by distance and stilled by depth. It is so much sky, a fallen shred caught in the cleft of banks. But it pours. The channel here is straight as an arrow; grace is itself an archer. Between the dangling wands of bankside willows, and Osage orange, I see the creek pour down. It spills toward me streaming over a series of sandstone tiers, down and down, and down. I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.
It is sheer coincidence that my hunk of the creek is strewn with boulders. I never merited this grace, that when I face upstream I scent the virgin breath of mountains, I feel a spray of mist on my cheeks and lips, I hear a ceaseless splash and susurrus, a sound of water not merely poured smoothly down air to fill a stead pool, but tumbling live about, over, under, around, between, though an intricate speckling of rock. It is sheer coincidence that upstream from me the creek’s bed is ridged in horizontal croppings of sandstone. I never merited this grace, that when I face upstream I see the light on the water careening towards me, inevitably, freely, down a graded series of terraces like the balanced winged platforms on infinite, inexhaustible font. “Ho, if you are thirsty, come down to the water; ho if you are hungry, come sit and eat.” This is the present, at last. This is the now , this flickering, broken light, this air that the wind of the future presses down my throat, pumping me buoyant giddy with praise.
My god, I look at the creek. It is the answer to Merton’s prayer, “Give us time!” It never stops. If I seek the senses and skills of children, the information of a thousand books, the innocence of puppies, even the insights of my own city past, I do so only, solely, entirely that I might look well at the creek. You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. You’ll have fish left over. The creek is the one great giver.
Here is the word from a subatomic physicist: “everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves.” Let me twist his meaning. Here it comes. The particles are broken; the waves are translucent, laving, roiling with beauty like sharks. The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources, the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.
Some reputable scientists, even today, are not wholly satisfied with the notion that the song of birds is strictly and solely a territorial claim. It’s an important point. We’ve been on earth all these years and we still don’t know for certain why birds sing. We need someone to unlock the code to the foreign language and give us the key; we need a new Rosetta stone.
Today I watched and heard a wren, a sparrow, and the mockingbird sing. My brain started to trill, why why why, what is the meaning meaning meaning? It’s not that they know something we don’t; we know much more than they do, and surely they don’t even know why they sing. No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singling. If the mockingbird were chirping to give us the long-sought formulae for a unified field theory, the point would be only slightly less irrelevant. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? The question is there since I take it as given as I have said, that beauty is something objectively performed- the tree that falls in the forest- having being externally, stumbled across, or missed, as real and present as both sides of the moon…If the lyric is simply, mine mine mine, then why the extravagance of the score? It has the liquid, intricate sound of every creek’s tumble over every configuration of rock creek-bottom in the country. Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code. And it could be that for beauty there is no key, that it will never make sense in our language but only in its own, and that we need to start all over again, on a new continent, learning the strange syllables one by one.
I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are.
I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. I’ve learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. I’ve read books; I’ve gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…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 and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems.
So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible face about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one…. The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.
You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?
You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted- just a replica- it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them in clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex?” When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella.
May 27, 2011
I deeply admire what Annie Dillard does. She has a way of crafting an essay in which readers learn little to nothing about her actual life, but feel as though they've been given a glimpse of something very personal. She has a way of achieving poignancy within these hugely intellectual/philosophical musings of hers and I think it comes from her ability to craft an indelible image and build upon it.
The Writing Life was, weirdly, the least interesting of the three for me. I had just read Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, which is so amazing, that Dillard's felt a little flat. I had hoped to learn more about the nuts and bolts of what she does, the practical side, but this text veers too far into the philosophical.
An American Childhood is gentle and nostalgic; it has a very serialized feel, with each chapter delving into a particular memory, so that it can be read in spurts and bursts. It's about kids riding their bikes down streets bathed by lamplight. It's about grass stains on the knees of your pants. It's about girls in party dresses going to church-sponsored dances and whispering behind their gloved hands about the boys. It's beautiful through and through.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is Dillard's most famous work. It's all about Dillard living in a cabin in rural Virginia, walking through fields and swamps, observing bugs and frogs, and thinking about life. Her obvious jumping-off point is Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which I read years ago. Both of these books—Thoreau’s and Dillard’s—are amazing pieces of American literature / philosophy, and it makes me feel like a total philistine, or someone entirely lacking in spiritual being, not to care for them. But I kinda don’t. I don’t like nature. I like couches. I like store-bought food. I like disinfectant. Still, Dillard made me feel, at least momentarily, like my rebellion is totally futile. That, I think is her main objective.
The Writing Life was, weirdly, the least interesting of the three for me. I had just read Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, which is so amazing, that Dillard's felt a little flat. I had hoped to learn more about the nuts and bolts of what she does, the practical side, but this text veers too far into the philosophical.
An American Childhood is gentle and nostalgic; it has a very serialized feel, with each chapter delving into a particular memory, so that it can be read in spurts and bursts. It's about kids riding their bikes down streets bathed by lamplight. It's about grass stains on the knees of your pants. It's about girls in party dresses going to church-sponsored dances and whispering behind their gloved hands about the boys. It's beautiful through and through.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is Dillard's most famous work. It's all about Dillard living in a cabin in rural Virginia, walking through fields and swamps, observing bugs and frogs, and thinking about life. Her obvious jumping-off point is Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which I read years ago. Both of these books—Thoreau’s and Dillard’s—are amazing pieces of American literature / philosophy, and it makes me feel like a total philistine, or someone entirely lacking in spiritual being, not to care for them. But I kinda don’t. I don’t like nature. I like couches. I like store-bought food. I like disinfectant. Still, Dillard made me feel, at least momentarily, like my rebellion is totally futile. That, I think is her main objective.
August 13, 2011
I'm still in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and think I will stop for the time being when I reach the end. Too many other books flooding in, both from the library and my mad amazon spending spree.
I appreciate Annie Dillard's compendium of observation, the diverse and fascinating data that salts this book, and the beauty of her writing.
I've finished Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and enjoyed it, although it isn't the kind of book I usually read. I will come back to the other two books later.
I have read it alternating with The Left Coast, which I'm almost finished with, and it has been an interesting juxtaposition. Both books about place, but approached very differently. I found myself wishing Dillard's book had photographs. Son Fradkin's photos add immensely to father Fradkin's well-researched and fascinating narrative pieces.
As a Californian for more than sixty years, I am familiar with much of the coast: I lived in San Diego from age nine to eighteen, and in the San Francisco Bay Area since then. I have visited Virginia only once, in 1976, when I camped with my husband and two children in the Blue Ridge during a cross-country driving adventure. I was there on my birthday (#37, eons ago), and we saw an owl.
I appreciate Annie Dillard's compendium of observation, the diverse and fascinating data that salts this book, and the beauty of her writing.
I've finished Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and enjoyed it, although it isn't the kind of book I usually read. I will come back to the other two books later.
I have read it alternating with The Left Coast, which I'm almost finished with, and it has been an interesting juxtaposition. Both books about place, but approached very differently. I found myself wishing Dillard's book had photographs. Son Fradkin's photos add immensely to father Fradkin's well-researched and fascinating narrative pieces.
As a Californian for more than sixty years, I am familiar with much of the coast: I lived in San Diego from age nine to eighteen, and in the San Francisco Bay Area since then. I have visited Virginia only once, in 1976, when I camped with my husband and two children in the Blue Ridge during a cross-country driving adventure. I was there on my birthday (#37, eons ago), and we saw an owl.
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November 22, 2024Three by Annie Dillard is a collection of three books, namely Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, An American Childhood and The Writing Life, by (big surprise!) Annie Dillard. Published between 1974-1989 these books deal, broadly speaking, with Dillards observations, thoughts and memories. In this review I will go over each book seperatly, as they are not really connected to each other except for being from the same author. But lets get on with the three reviews themselves.
Pilgrim At Tinker Creek is an account of Dillards wanderings, thoughts and observations centered around Tinker Creek. Its chapters loosely span a year, starting in January, yet the encounters and stories in it are spread over many years. The book is quite difficult to describe, as she deals with many different things in each chapter. One of the main threads connecting the different chapters is, as mentioned, Tinker Creek. Meandering, just like the book itself, the creek flows near Dillards house and is a source of inspiration to her, as well as home to many fellow creatures. The book deals for a large part with her observations of all the living things living in or around the creek. But Dillard also touches upon other, broader topics such as what it means to live in the present, the intricacies of nature, the horrors of fecundity and many things more. What connects the chapters, besides the creek, is her beautiful prose. Dillards writing often evokes an inexplicable feeling of homeliness and comfort. Take for example her description of leaving the woods on her way home: “I left the woods, spreading silence before me in a wave, as though I’d stepped not through the forest, but on it. I left the wood silent, but I myself was stirred and quickened. I’ll go to the Northwest Territories, I thought, Finland.”
Generally I really like nature writing (such as the wonderful The Outermost House), so it did not surprise me that I enjoyed Dillards description of her various encounters with different animals, such as musk rats, copperheads or grasshoppers. What did surprise me was how well Dillard transitioned, from so seemingly ordinary encounters to much broader topics whilst seemingly never losing her original track of thought. While reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek you have to give yourself over to the author, letting her carry you from one meandering line of thought to the next. Dillard asks questions that never occurred to me, yet are deeply fascinating such as: “I wonder how long it would take you to notice the regular recurrence of the seasons if you were the first man on earth. What would it be like to live in open-ended time broken only by days and nights?”
And even though I did not follow her every thought (nor agreed with everything), the book left me with many questions I had not asked and things I have not thought about until now. So best try it out yourself for a couple of chapters, maybe you will like it as much as I did.
An American Childhood is the second book in this collection. In it Dillard tells, as the title suggests, stories of her childhood growing up in the 1950s in Pittsburgh. The book starts as she begins consciously remembering things, around four or five, and ends with her being around 18. However, as the previous book, An American Childhood is not simply a collection of memories. Dillard reflects on the interior life, her love of reading, how she did not always fit into the role expected of girls at the time and much more. I especially enjoyed her talking about books and, somewhat linked to that, her curiosity, writing for example: “Everywhere, things snagged me. The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world.”
Another major theme is of course revealed in the second word of the title. As a few examples; Dillard often talks about the history of Pittsburgh, what it means to be American and also touches on a few occasions on racism. Somewhat ironic Dillard writes on upper class Americans, such as herself: “People who cared to rave about their bloodlines, Mother told us, had stayed in Europe, which deserved them. We were vaguely proud of living in a city so full of distinctive immigrant groups, among which we never thought to number ourselves. We had no occasion to visit the steep hillside neighborhoods – Polish, Hungarian, Rumanian, Italian, Slav – of the turn-of-the-century immigrants […].” However, besides these broader topics the book is stuffed with small anecdotes and stories all throughout her childhood. From her plotting to kill her sister, to various encounters with boys up until her more difficult years of puberty. And even though some of these stories, such as her times at the dancing school, were less interesting than others, due to the short length of these, they did not make that big of an impact on the experience of reading this book. The experience being of course a positive one.
Comparing An American Childhood to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek I think the former is easier to get into as it follows more of a common thread (Dillard slowely growing up), even though I liked the latter more due to its themes which interest me slightly more. Nevertheless An American Childhood too is well worth a read.
The Writing Life is the last and also the smallest book in this collection. It is mostly about Dillards various thoughts on and stories of the process of writing. Among other things, she writes about the places she has written at, how one writes and where one gets the inspiration needed. Paraphrasing Thoreau for example, Dillard explains how a book leads its author, just like a bee leads one to its hive. But the book is about much more than, Dillard also talks about literature and art more broadly, meandering from one thought to the next. The many tangents and allegories are both strengths and weaknesses of The Writing Life. Whilst I mostly enjoyed the parts about her writing process, I did not really enjoy her speaking on art more broadly. I especially disliked the last chapter which, while interesting, did not add anything meaningful to the book nor really fit in. In it she talks about a stunt pilot, comparing his incredible manouvers with a plane to art. Nevertheless, it was once again beautifully written and I enjoyed it for the most part. If your interested give it a read, especially considering its short length.
Okay, my first three-in-one review. Phew. Let me tell you this was not easy and not only due to a combined 600+ pages. As you may have noticed, I struggled in accurately describing each of these three books and I still think I did not really do them justice. Every single book contains so many different thoughts and ideas, which made it difficult for me to describe them accurately without filling more pages. However, I am glad I read them even though I would not recommend reading them back to back (as I did), but taking a break with something different in between. Whilst I suggest starting with An American Life (because of reasons explained above) if you can not decide which book interests you most, I personally enjoyed Pilgrim at Tinkers Creek the most. Another reason (apart from the ones mentioned) why I enjoyed The Writing Life the least, may also be due to me looking forward to this one the most, so I may have had higher expectations from the start. Still, as I have said multiple times now every book in Three By Annie Dillard is well worth reading.
Pilgrim At Tinker Creek is an account of Dillards wanderings, thoughts and observations centered around Tinker Creek. Its chapters loosely span a year, starting in January, yet the encounters and stories in it are spread over many years. The book is quite difficult to describe, as she deals with many different things in each chapter. One of the main threads connecting the different chapters is, as mentioned, Tinker Creek. Meandering, just like the book itself, the creek flows near Dillards house and is a source of inspiration to her, as well as home to many fellow creatures. The book deals for a large part with her observations of all the living things living in or around the creek. But Dillard also touches upon other, broader topics such as what it means to live in the present, the intricacies of nature, the horrors of fecundity and many things more. What connects the chapters, besides the creek, is her beautiful prose. Dillards writing often evokes an inexplicable feeling of homeliness and comfort. Take for example her description of leaving the woods on her way home: “I left the woods, spreading silence before me in a wave, as though I’d stepped not through the forest, but on it. I left the wood silent, but I myself was stirred and quickened. I’ll go to the Northwest Territories, I thought, Finland.”
Generally I really like nature writing (such as the wonderful The Outermost House), so it did not surprise me that I enjoyed Dillards description of her various encounters with different animals, such as musk rats, copperheads or grasshoppers. What did surprise me was how well Dillard transitioned, from so seemingly ordinary encounters to much broader topics whilst seemingly never losing her original track of thought. While reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek you have to give yourself over to the author, letting her carry you from one meandering line of thought to the next. Dillard asks questions that never occurred to me, yet are deeply fascinating such as: “I wonder how long it would take you to notice the regular recurrence of the seasons if you were the first man on earth. What would it be like to live in open-ended time broken only by days and nights?”
And even though I did not follow her every thought (nor agreed with everything), the book left me with many questions I had not asked and things I have not thought about until now. So best try it out yourself for a couple of chapters, maybe you will like it as much as I did.
An American Childhood is the second book in this collection. In it Dillard tells, as the title suggests, stories of her childhood growing up in the 1950s in Pittsburgh. The book starts as she begins consciously remembering things, around four or five, and ends with her being around 18. However, as the previous book, An American Childhood is not simply a collection of memories. Dillard reflects on the interior life, her love of reading, how she did not always fit into the role expected of girls at the time and much more. I especially enjoyed her talking about books and, somewhat linked to that, her curiosity, writing for example: “Everywhere, things snagged me. The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world.”
Another major theme is of course revealed in the second word of the title. As a few examples; Dillard often talks about the history of Pittsburgh, what it means to be American and also touches on a few occasions on racism. Somewhat ironic Dillard writes on upper class Americans, such as herself: “People who cared to rave about their bloodlines, Mother told us, had stayed in Europe, which deserved them. We were vaguely proud of living in a city so full of distinctive immigrant groups, among which we never thought to number ourselves. We had no occasion to visit the steep hillside neighborhoods – Polish, Hungarian, Rumanian, Italian, Slav – of the turn-of-the-century immigrants […].” However, besides these broader topics the book is stuffed with small anecdotes and stories all throughout her childhood. From her plotting to kill her sister, to various encounters with boys up until her more difficult years of puberty. And even though some of these stories, such as her times at the dancing school, were less interesting than others, due to the short length of these, they did not make that big of an impact on the experience of reading this book. The experience being of course a positive one.
Comparing An American Childhood to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek I think the former is easier to get into as it follows more of a common thread (Dillard slowely growing up), even though I liked the latter more due to its themes which interest me slightly more. Nevertheless An American Childhood too is well worth a read.
The Writing Life is the last and also the smallest book in this collection. It is mostly about Dillards various thoughts on and stories of the process of writing. Among other things, she writes about the places she has written at, how one writes and where one gets the inspiration needed. Paraphrasing Thoreau for example, Dillard explains how a book leads its author, just like a bee leads one to its hive. But the book is about much more than, Dillard also talks about literature and art more broadly, meandering from one thought to the next. The many tangents and allegories are both strengths and weaknesses of The Writing Life. Whilst I mostly enjoyed the parts about her writing process, I did not really enjoy her speaking on art more broadly. I especially disliked the last chapter which, while interesting, did not add anything meaningful to the book nor really fit in. In it she talks about a stunt pilot, comparing his incredible manouvers with a plane to art. Nevertheless, it was once again beautifully written and I enjoyed it for the most part. If your interested give it a read, especially considering its short length.
Okay, my first three-in-one review. Phew. Let me tell you this was not easy and not only due to a combined 600+ pages. As you may have noticed, I struggled in accurately describing each of these three books and I still think I did not really do them justice. Every single book contains so many different thoughts and ideas, which made it difficult for me to describe them accurately without filling more pages. However, I am glad I read them even though I would not recommend reading them back to back (as I did), but taking a break with something different in between. Whilst I suggest starting with An American Life (because of reasons explained above) if you can not decide which book interests you most, I personally enjoyed Pilgrim at Tinkers Creek the most. Another reason (apart from the ones mentioned) why I enjoyed The Writing Life the least, may also be due to me looking forward to this one the most, so I may have had higher expectations from the start. Still, as I have said multiple times now every book in Three By Annie Dillard is well worth reading.
July 5, 2015
I first read this 3-work set by Dillard almost 30 years ago and some of the imagery is so vivid that I have remembered it to this day. I'm embarrassed to say it took me 5 months to read it this time around; it's not that I was disinterested, but I felt the subject matter was so weighty it deserved a slow, savoring read.
The first time I read this, I was in my late teens/early 20s and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was my favorite of the three essays. This time, An American Childhood really resounded with me and I have been inspired by The Writing Life. I now live on a hobby farm and found that Pilgrim at Tinker Creek left me feeling slightly fatalistic since I've been witness to the harsher side of Nature on more than one occasion myself. I'm not sure I wanted the reminder, regardless of how eloquently it was portrayed.
An American Childhood and The Writing Life, on the other hand, spoke closer to my heart at present. They were more upbeat, more nostalgic and allowed a brief glimpse of the introspective, brilliant mind of Dillard.
The first time I read this, I was in my late teens/early 20s and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was my favorite of the three essays. This time, An American Childhood really resounded with me and I have been inspired by The Writing Life. I now live on a hobby farm and found that Pilgrim at Tinker Creek left me feeling slightly fatalistic since I've been witness to the harsher side of Nature on more than one occasion myself. I'm not sure I wanted the reminder, regardless of how eloquently it was portrayed.
An American Childhood and The Writing Life, on the other hand, spoke closer to my heart at present. They were more upbeat, more nostalgic and allowed a brief glimpse of the introspective, brilliant mind of Dillard.
February 1, 2023
Three awesome books which, I suppose, have been forgotten now except in university courses. But they shouldn’t be forgotten because the books are rich with life and struggle and wonder, and reading them makes us rich in that way too.
Authors, in particular, but readers too, will be greatly inspired by The Writing Life.
Authors, in particular, but readers too, will be greatly inspired by The Writing Life.
May 26, 2023
I've read the beginning of "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" so many times, certain passages now feel sacred. Indeed, Dillard writes with a holy reverence for nature. Her writing slows you down and invites you to consider the little things. She instructs us to look, really look at the world around us. Her prose is so beautiful, it makes you want to cry at times. And yet, her voice is distinctly an American one.
While the other pieces, "An American Childhood" and "The Writing Life", were new to me, I enjoyed them equally, and found that these 3 works fit so well together in the same volume. It left me wanting to read more of Dillard's work, which I plan to do!
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
"...cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day..."
While the other pieces, "An American Childhood" and "The Writing Life", were new to me, I enjoyed them equally, and found that these 3 works fit so well together in the same volume. It left me wanting to read more of Dillard's work, which I plan to do!
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
"...cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day..."
August 6, 2015
I just finished Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and I think it time to take a break from Annie Dillard and come back to the rest later. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a beautiful book, slow reading, a book on seeing, and curiosity, and learning from the minutia of nature. It's made me pay more attention to the world of tiny things around me, and marvel at all of nature's graphic contradictions and possibilities, and the extraordinary weirdness of insects. I also think Eudora Welty put it perfectly in her 1974 NYT review of this book, there are times when "I honestly do not know what she is talking about." Oh well!
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September 22, 2016"The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance." p19
July 2, 2012
Sometimes I am a lazy reader. I like obvious plots, obvious characters etc. That doesn't always mean good writing. Good writers aren't lazy. Annie Dillard isn't lazy and her writing isn't easy.It's beautiful! So far, I've only read An American Childhood, but based on the language, I look forward to reading the others novels as well.
Currently reading
June 11, 2011I am not much for nature in literature or even poetry. So it speaks very highly in my eyes that Annie Dillard can talk so much about nature that is quite interesting to me. :-D
February 17, 2023
A republication together in 1990 of three of Annie Dillard's books:
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974): A year's worth of observing and musing near Dillard's home in Virginia's Blue Ridge. Pages on a praying mantis laying its eggs, or a muskrat swimming beneath a bridge, or plankton from pond water viewed under a microscope. Some of this is beautiful, but some of it is just a lot. There is unexpected humor: "My fingers were stiff and red with cold, and my nose ran. I had forgotten the Law of the Wild, which is, 'Carry Kleenex'" (p. 61). Dillard was still in her 20s when she wrote this, and it won a Pulitzer.
An American Childhood (1987): Essays on growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, in more or less chronological order. Roaming free around the neighborhood, spending summers at grandparents' Ohio summer house on Lake Erie, learning to identify rocks and birds. The times: polio epidemic and Salk vaccine, books about World War II and fear of the Bomb. Best of all, Annie got her own microscope and learned to use it, even finding an amoeba in pond water - amazing (pp. 425ff.). I've never heard of anyone besides me who did this kind of thing (though it sounds like she was more successful than I was). Dillard was in her 40s when this was published; maybe she had kept a journal? Otherwise, what a memory!
The Writing Life (1989): A series of small essays on Dillard's experience of writing and what her process is like. She comments on places where she has written: "Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark" (p. 564). That shows how individual writers' needs are; I feel just the opposite. Dillard says that she hates writing; then why does she do it? She ends with the story of stunt pilot Dave Rahm; flying with him, she sees that he isn't necessarily enjoying it, but is focused on the art he is producing for people below to see. That seems to be why Annie Dillard writes too.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974): A year's worth of observing and musing near Dillard's home in Virginia's Blue Ridge. Pages on a praying mantis laying its eggs, or a muskrat swimming beneath a bridge, or plankton from pond water viewed under a microscope. Some of this is beautiful, but some of it is just a lot. There is unexpected humor: "My fingers were stiff and red with cold, and my nose ran. I had forgotten the Law of the Wild, which is, 'Carry Kleenex'" (p. 61). Dillard was still in her 20s when she wrote this, and it won a Pulitzer.
An American Childhood (1987): Essays on growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, in more or less chronological order. Roaming free around the neighborhood, spending summers at grandparents' Ohio summer house on Lake Erie, learning to identify rocks and birds. The times: polio epidemic and Salk vaccine, books about World War II and fear of the Bomb. Best of all, Annie got her own microscope and learned to use it, even finding an amoeba in pond water - amazing (pp. 425ff.). I've never heard of anyone besides me who did this kind of thing (though it sounds like she was more successful than I was). Dillard was in her 40s when this was published; maybe she had kept a journal? Otherwise, what a memory!
The Writing Life (1989): A series of small essays on Dillard's experience of writing and what her process is like. She comments on places where she has written: "Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark" (p. 564). That shows how individual writers' needs are; I feel just the opposite. Dillard says that she hates writing; then why does she do it? She ends with the story of stunt pilot Dave Rahm; flying with him, she sees that he isn't necessarily enjoying it, but is focused on the art he is producing for people below to see. That seems to be why Annie Dillard writes too.
July 16, 2018
Okay - I cheated. I did not read the final story, "The Writing Life", but I was Dillard-ed out by then. This is a wonderful author whose descriptions - most especially of nature - were enchanting & thrilling. That said, lots & lots of introspection & philosophical meanderings - not a fan. Perhaps I would have enjoyed that more when I was young and more inclined to deep thinking.
March 28, 2021
Not my usual reading fare. Mostly nature writing about bugs and other wildlife. The Writing Life is also about the isolation of writing. An American Childhood is also about upper class Pittsburgh society in the 50s and 60s.
July 22, 2019
All three books insightful and beautifully, poetically, written.
September 14, 2019
Annie Dillard's voice echoes Thoreau's. I love the way she transports her readers into the world of seeing and being in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek!
December 30, 2019
Read "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"
March 24, 2024
What else can I say other than I love Annie Dillard? Phenomenal writing.
Want to read
June 11, 20246/11/24 Found it by asking ChatGPT "If I enjoy the nature writing of Henry David Thoreau, what other authors would I enjoy?"
June 18, 2024
I found these books to be very up and down. There were times and chapters that had me mesmerized, smiling and enjoying her writing. Then there were other chapters that almost put me to sleep or left me trying to figure out what in the heck she was trying to say.
January 7, 2026
Great to have in a collection like this.
August 11, 2024
I only read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It was incredible. I’ve never read anything quite like it.
March 13, 2021
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. This is a novel unlike any other. Augenblick...
August 6, 2009
In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I was a part of the picture of nature.
The scientific and mythologic context of nature and people are breaded throughout the pages.
An Eskimo tale that is unforgettable to me:
“Is beauty itself an intricately fashioned lure, the cruelest hoax of all? There is a certain fragment of an ancient and involved Eskimo tale I read in Farley Mowat that for years has risen, unbidden, in my mind. The fragment is a short scenario, observing all the classical unities, simple and cruel, and performed by the light of a soapstone seal-oil lamp:
A young man in a strange land falls in love with a young woman and takes her to wife in her mother’s tent. By day the women chew skins and boil meat while the young man hunts. But the old crone is jealous; she wants the boy. Calling her daughter to her one day, she offers to braid her hair; the girl sits pleased, proud, and soon is strangled by her own hair. One thing Eskimos know is skinning. The mother takes her curved hand knife shaped like a dancing skirt, skins her daughter’s beautiful face, and presses that empty flap smooth on her own skull. When the boy returns that night he lies with her, in the tent on top of the world. But he is wet from hunting; the skin mask shrinks and slides, uncovering the shriveled face of the old mother, and the boy flees in horror, forever..."
The scientific and mythologic context of nature and people are breaded throughout the pages.
An Eskimo tale that is unforgettable to me:
“Is beauty itself an intricately fashioned lure, the cruelest hoax of all? There is a certain fragment of an ancient and involved Eskimo tale I read in Farley Mowat that for years has risen, unbidden, in my mind. The fragment is a short scenario, observing all the classical unities, simple and cruel, and performed by the light of a soapstone seal-oil lamp:
A young man in a strange land falls in love with a young woman and takes her to wife in her mother’s tent. By day the women chew skins and boil meat while the young man hunts. But the old crone is jealous; she wants the boy. Calling her daughter to her one day, she offers to braid her hair; the girl sits pleased, proud, and soon is strangled by her own hair. One thing Eskimos know is skinning. The mother takes her curved hand knife shaped like a dancing skirt, skins her daughter’s beautiful face, and presses that empty flap smooth on her own skull. When the boy returns that night he lies with her, in the tent on top of the world. But he is wet from hunting; the skin mask shrinks and slides, uncovering the shriveled face of the old mother, and the boy flees in horror, forever..."
July 2, 2009
There are three books in this book, the first is A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and that is which I've read.
I bought this because J.D. Jespersen recommended it, and both professors Carl and Colpitts read from it and other Annie Dillard while we worked in our art classes. I started it not really sure what the point was, and I finished the same. Whatever compelled her to write all this down, however, I am incredibly grateful for because I was fascinated from start to finish. Basically, she gives a description of her surroundings, but not in a general way (I'm not sure she even mentions what state, let alone what town she is in) or in specific (she never distinctly lays out a map of her exact surroundings), but in tangent. She mentions something from the nature around her, and then goes on terrific tangents imparting all sorts of knowledge she's gathered about or related to whatever it was she came across that day. I found it somewhat familiar to Nature and other science magazine articles, but as if it was the Nature issue related only to Tinker Creek, but also involving reflection and narrative and wisdom and other connected secondary and tertiary thoughts conveyed in a more engaging manner.
I bought this because J.D. Jespersen recommended it, and both professors Carl and Colpitts read from it and other Annie Dillard while we worked in our art classes. I started it not really sure what the point was, and I finished the same. Whatever compelled her to write all this down, however, I am incredibly grateful for because I was fascinated from start to finish. Basically, she gives a description of her surroundings, but not in a general way (I'm not sure she even mentions what state, let alone what town she is in) or in specific (she never distinctly lays out a map of her exact surroundings), but in tangent. She mentions something from the nature around her, and then goes on terrific tangents imparting all sorts of knowledge she's gathered about or related to whatever it was she came across that day. I found it somewhat familiar to Nature and other science magazine articles, but as if it was the Nature issue related only to Tinker Creek, but also involving reflection and narrative and wisdom and other connected secondary and tertiary thoughts conveyed in a more engaging manner.
August 5, 2012
This happens to be my favorite book, and has been since the tender year that I was a fumbling sophomore in college, meeting "An American Childhood" for the first time. This book and I - we would meet again and again over the years, sometimes in a seemingly never-ending succession, sometimes at intervals that re-created the magic, the lump in my throat that made me fall in love with this work in the first place.
I cannot adequately frame with words that find themselves paltry, and simultaneously bare, the astonishment I have felt at finding my own life's sentiment so elegantly expressed in this work. It has moved me, deeply. Growing up - sometimes you forget the dream world of childhood, where magic existed. Surely it did - just beyond the bend. The goal then, was to run fast enough, silently enough, to catch it before it sensed your approach. “Thank you” is such a foolish, inadequate thing to say to someone when the gift they've given was so personal, so wide.
I cannot adequately frame with words that find themselves paltry, and simultaneously bare, the astonishment I have felt at finding my own life's sentiment so elegantly expressed in this work. It has moved me, deeply. Growing up - sometimes you forget the dream world of childhood, where magic existed. Surely it did - just beyond the bend. The goal then, was to run fast enough, silently enough, to catch it before it sensed your approach. “Thank you” is such a foolish, inadequate thing to say to someone when the gift they've given was so personal, so wide.
July 11, 2007
Annie Dillard is worthy of her many accolades she has received and Tinker Creek and An American Childhood are two of her best works. The Writing Life, is less strong, but is an interesting behind-the-scenes look at her process.
Dillard has a eye for finding immediacy and meaning in small moments in a way that doesn't feel hackneyed or forced and descriptions are lovely.
My only fault with these books is that Dillard uses a handful of the same stories in both Childhood and Tinkercreek, but they are stoires i would willingly read again and again.
Dillard has a eye for finding immediacy and meaning in small moments in a way that doesn't feel hackneyed or forced and descriptions are lovely.
My only fault with these books is that Dillard uses a handful of the same stories in both Childhood and Tinkercreek, but they are stoires i would willingly read again and again.
March 30, 2021
Only finished Pilgrim at Tinker Creek this time. I’ll definitely come back for the other two, but don’t want this to hang out on my reading list for years.
Gorgeous writing, crunchy and navel-gazey natural philosophy.
***
Adding my review for An American Childhood. Not sure which I liked better, but she writes just as well about childhood as about nature. Made me cherish my own childhood years, and just like Pilgrim, made me want to slow down and notice things, and enjoy the time we have.
Gorgeous writing, crunchy and navel-gazey natural philosophy.
***
Adding my review for An American Childhood. Not sure which I liked better, but she writes just as well about childhood as about nature. Made me cherish my own childhood years, and just like Pilgrim, made me want to slow down and notice things, and enjoy the time we have.
March 30, 2008
I read all of these books separately but they're three of her best. The one that truly shows what Dillard can do is the Pulitzer-winning 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'. If you like that, you'll probably like 'An American Childhood', though it's not nearly so deep (nor is it intended to be). 'The Writing Life' is a good solid read for any writer. Lots of inspiration and good advice here.
May 23, 2011
Most buy this for a A Writing life but the true masterpiece is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard's paen of praise to nature in the style of Thoreau.I believe this to be one of the most sensitive works of American literature that few read today but were oh so popular some 40 years ago.Like a fine piece of archaeology it can be read on many levels.....
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