Pilgrim at Tinker Creek!

Our book today is one of those modern classics every reader should read: Annie Dillard’s great Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1975. In these pages – part memoir, part natural history, part crackpot seat-of-the-pants philosophy – she muses on the natural world of her surroundings in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, an infernal region infested with biting blackflies and countless slithering poisonous vipers, but a region in which she nevertheless manages to find beauty and even poetry in almost every square inch.

In fact, sometimes quite literally in every square inch, as in the nifty moment when she takes a cup of duck-pond water (which looks “like seething broth”) and puts it under a microscope to see all the tiny creatures living in that universe. Like any sensible person, she finds these glimpses into that universe deeply, almost physically unsettling, but out of a sheer sense of wonder, she makes herself do it anyway:

Somewhere, I can’t find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” “No,” said the priest, “not if you did not know.” “Then why,” asked the Eskimo earnestly, “did you tell me?” If I did not know about the rotifers and paramecia, and all the bloom of plankton clogging the dying pond, fine; but since I’ve seen it, I must somehow deal with it, take it into account. “Never lose a holy curiosity,” Einstein said; and so I lift my microscope down from the shelf, spread a drop of duck pond on a glass slide, and try to look spring in the eye.

This vertiginous hunger for perspective is one of the many things that makes Pilgrim at Tinker Creek such a perennially satisfying reading experience. Like Tennyson’s flower in the crannied wall – “…if I could understand/What you are, root and all, and all in all,/I should know what God and man is” – Dillard’s little patch of the Blue Ridge yields an infinity of perspectives under her patient interrogation. No matter how many times I read this wonderful book (and I’ve read it and recommended it and handed it to people many, many times), I’m always impressed not only by Dillard’s rhetorical abilities but also by this willingness of hers to observe the entire universe unfolding around her, even when all she’s doing is sitting at the kitchen table:

A rosy, complex light fills my kitchen at the end of these lengthening June days. From an explosion on a nearby star eight minutes ago, the light zips through space, particle-wave, strikes the planet, angles on the continent, and filters through a mesh of land dust: clay bits, sod bits, tiny wind-borne insects, bacteria, shreds of wing and leg, gravel dust, grits of carbon, and dried cells of grass, bark, and leaves. Reddened, the light inclines into this valley over green western mountains; it sifts between pine needles on norther slopes, and through all the mountain blackjack oak and haw, whose leaves are unclenching, one by one, and making an intricate, toothed and lobed haze. The light crosses the valley, threads through the screen on my open kitchen window, and gilds the painted wall. A plank of brightness bends from the wall and extends over the goldfish bowl on the table where I sit.

Chances are good that no matter where you live, there’s a used bookshop near you with a copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – if you’ve seen that copy (or the ones at the library) and wondered if you should read it, the answer is an emphatic yes.