Tony Menendez

Dr. Nordquist

Literary Non-Fiction

December 13, 1999

Genre: Annie Dillard’s book a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a book designed to go beyond mere meditation. Instead this book finds itself(as so many of Dillard’s do) in a Christian /Mystical category. This because the book has modest Christian themes hidden inside to propose a mighty sovereign God. Mystical in proportion to those ideas she relates to God. All encompassed its spiritual nature walk that would be found on a book shelf with other

Spiritual writing.

Summary: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek shows the experiences of a nature lover in her backyard, which is located in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. There she goes on to explore what nature has to offer. Often times finding her self-analyzing things in and around Tinker Creek. In this, she finds more than the pleasantries of the outdoors. Instead a water bug becomes a focus that shows her elements that attribute to a divine presence. Then our faithful follower of nature directs toward that eternal element for ourselves to see by showing us what is required to attain an essence of the beyond. In this explaining she continues to use the microcosmic things( a penny in this case) to show such grand scale ideas. Once in "Seeing" the element of observation is explained, Dillard presents her next special bug in that of preying mantis. In this she maintains a notion of a bug that is held by situations that our brought upon in it nature causing it to adapt. Underlying this Dillard seems to push humankind in the role of the mantis that always needs to be open to what changes nature brings. In her next chapter "The Present" Dillard then deals with this issue of the ever changing conditions setting forth a Thorouean idea of living for those things that you still are allowed to have. This then seems to be the shift of sorts in the book where the chapter on "Intricacy" shows that we have are the small things that we never look for or that we don’t see them because we are not ever patient enough. In this Dillard promotes an idea of an unruly divine being that only wants to help if the human being wants to be helped. This seems to be depicted by the wanting muteness our viewer holds in order to see that most allusive creature the muskrat. In the muskrat she seems to build on a relationship with faith in this yet to be seen object. Faith seems to be a prerequisite to even balance out her thoughts that what is to be grasped is even worth seeing. In this Dillard concludes describing a God that might seem to us horrific. Yet to her pleasing because she has been able to change her view on what beauty is all about and realized that a concentration of beauty rests on all objects because the creator has made it that way.

Biographical Sketch: Annie Dillard was born in urban Pittsburgh in 1945. There she grew with in her fascination of nature. As a writer Dillard portrays this nature interest often entangled with that of her religious views to show something of a transcendental nature. Her first book Tickets for a Prayer Wheel was the first of such writings that sought out to show the existence of a hidden God. Her first notable publication was her Pulitzer Prize winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Dillard then went on to publish another book Holy the Firm which was written to demonstrate the metaphysical aspects of pain. Then in Living by Fiction Dillard temporarily escapes the realm of religion to show the difference between modernist and traditional fiction. Other pieces Dillard has written include An American Childhood which is a autobiography of Dillard’s life, The Writing Life a study of a writer at work, and Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters a work praised for its great sense of wonder. Overall Dillard’s work demonstrates often the writers love for the silence and mystery in the world around her.

Often chapters of many of her books are taken out and used as essays in different anthologies. Dillard because of this receives the title of essayist even though she seems to think it’s an undeserved title. We continue to label her as so because of such great works like "Seeing" a chapter in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Characteristics, Persona, Structure and Style: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is an example of literary fiction. This is because Dillard goes beyond just an account of nature in a journalistic manner. She instead plunges into making each individual creature a character on their own giving them a stature that they would never have on their own. Dillard depicts her animals as such and then gives a description of them that has a certain poetic rhythm of sorts. This is often done in Dillard’s work by using the semicolon function as end-stop point. Dillard then continues into parallel structures to establish an even deeper description. These structures are often used as ways in which Dillard can approach the metaphysical. Dillard often mentions that the sentence length was so notable because she suffered from "youth’s drawback" a love for grand sentences. In this she says that a sentence isn’t done "until it was overdone."

Target Audience & Overall Evaluation: In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Dillard seems to be reaching out to those readers who want something more than just a nature meditation. In this she draws a reader seeking a spiritual travel through the underlings of nature. A person who likes to venture into self-examination would be best suited for this book.

I thought the book was good. In that it accomplished it’s objective of resurfacing what knowledge should be for a person looking for an understanding of life. In this ascetic view she then manages to go beyond just a favorable opinion of God to one that borderlines scary. She wraps these two elements of a creator so well that the reader soon has to look at this view as being quite possible because no one on this earth knows for sure.

"God is subtle, Einstein said, "but not malicious. "Again, Einstein said that "nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning." It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly its hem. In making the thick darkness, a swaddling band for the sea, God "set bars and doors" and said, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further." But have we come even that far(9)?

But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calebrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut(33).

What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of the sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork – for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl – but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freelly given, its soil and sap: and that the creator loves pizzaz(139).

What if God has the same affectionate disregard for us that we have for barnacles? I don’t know if each barnacle larva is of itself unique and special, or if we the people are essentially as interchangeable as bricks. My brain is full of numbers; they swell and would split covering the back of my hands like blown dust motes moistened to clay. I have hatched, too, with millions of my kind into a milky way that spreads from an unknown shore(169).

The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear; if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and it is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death(183).

And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating, I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves(200).

Stalking is a pure form of skill, like a pitching or playing chess. Rarely is luck involved. I do it right or I do it wrong; the muskrat will tell me, and that right early. Even more than baseball, stalking is a game played in the actual present. At every second, the muskrat comes, or strays, or goes, depending on my skill(203).

Moses said to God, "I beseech thee, shew me thy glory." And god said, "Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live." But he added, "There is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: and it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cliff of the rock, and will cover thee, with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen(207).

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(271).