Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

by Annie Dillard

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.

Precisely: we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die—does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our skins.

Knock; seek; ask.

I felt a rush of such pure energy I thought I would not need to breathe for days.

Everything scatters and gathers; everything comes and goes like fish under a bridge.

I was up to my knees in the world.

The towhee has the brass and grace to call, simply and clearly, “tweet.” I know of no other bird that stoops to literal tweeting.

They fly over Lake Superior without resting; in fact, observers there have discovered a curious thing. Instead of flying directly south, the monarchs crossing high over the water take an inexplicable turn towards the east. Then when they reach an invisible point, they all veer south again. Each successive swarm repeats this mysterious dogleg movement, year after year. Entomologists actually think that the butterflies might be “remembering” the position of a long-gone, looming glacier.

A New Yorker essay that fall noted that mathematicians do good work while they are young because as they age they suffer “the failure of the nerve for excellence.”