Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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Summary: An All-You-Can-Eat Buffet for the mind and spirit
Review: What I initially viewed as a curse became one of the most enlightening experiences of my educational career. As an assignment in my English class, I had to read both Walden, by Henry David Thoreau and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard. Whenever one has read both Walden and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the comparisons are inevitable. The subject matter, the child-like fascination with nature, and the dry humor are quite similar in both books. However, the differences are also rather evident. Simply put, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was written by a woman. Instead of being full of philosophical appeals to the mind, it tends to appeal more to the romantic fancies. Where Walden presented guidelines and suggestions for living life simply and ethically, Pilgrim hails living in the present and enjoying each moment to the fullest. Dillard employs simpler language, shorter sentences, and more crisp, clean transitions than the sometimes "sermonish" Walden. For the intellectual, Walden is like a seven-course meal fit for a king. It offers such sustenance as to feed a mind infinitely. In comparison intellectually, Pilgrim is more of an all-you-can-eat buffet. While it might not be as wholesome and filling, everyone can find something they like to take away from it.
If you have not had the pleasure of reading Walden and therefore find the above comparisons meaningless, then here's the basic plot of the book: Annie Dillard moves to the Tinker Creek area in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. There she not only intently observes nature, she experiences it. Dillard shares her finds and views in the book. Some readers may find the book slightly boring because there is no gripping plot. On the other hand, the whole book is like a beautiful poem plucked delicately from Dillard's mind. It flows beautifully and has a great full-circle effect. If you are looking for a book that keeps you on the edge of your seat or transports you into an enchanting romantic entanglement, this is not the book for you. However, if poetic observations on life and nature sprinkled with dry humor is your deal, then this book should be right up your alley. I recommend everyone experience this book. I'm glad I did.

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Summary: Surviving the Quicksand
Review: Along with the many A.P. English students before me, I had to read Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as part of the curriculum. I began reading the book with low expectations and finished with a great appreciation of nature and Annie Dillard as a writer.

Annie Dillard's writing style is like that of nothing else I have ever read. By looking at any paragraph in the book, it will not take long to find at least one simile. Dillard has a wonderfully unique way of integrating similes and parallel structure throughout the entire book. The reader will also notice Annie Dillard's full circle effect. A technique that can be easily spotted at the end of every chapter and eventually at the end of the book. The diction is used makes the reader feel as if they are actually experiencing the wonder of nature itself.

Prior to reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek our class was required to read Walden by Henry David Thorough. These books are quite alike in many different ways. Both authors have a child-like view on the natural world around them, both show their intelligence by allusions and scientific evidence, and both are very descriptive in their writing. When describing the two books I have found that Walden is more like quicksand. It's deep and often difficult to wade through. The struggle of the journey leaves the reader exhausted, but satisfied to have made it through. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is more like a pleasant stroll in a luscious garden. The reader will see some beautiful and interesting things along the way, but nothing immensely life-altering. When the reader has reached the end of the garden, they feel no regrets about going through.

I hate to admit it, but I thoroughly enjoyed the book. The similes and diction were absolutely beautiful, and I admire her child-like view on the world.

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Summary: The good, the bad, and the Giant Water Bug
Review: Like many high school students, I was required to read 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek' for my AP Language and Composition class. It is not hard to see why this book is often chosen for the curriculum of that class (beyond the fact that all teachers appear to have a sadistic streak). This book is brimming with figurative language that paints a vivid picture of Annie Dillard's world and her opinions on it. There are many stylistic elements, such as imagery, similes, abrupt transitions, etc, and Dillard is a true master of the "full circle" effect.
Dillard is definitely eccentric, and this book details roughly a year of her life, documenting her experiences while living near Tinker Mountain. She looks at everything with fresh, unclouded, almost childlike innocence. and while it frequently digresses into drawn out, tedious introspection, there are some shining moments when the book is truly fascinating. Dillard is extremely well-read, and some of the topics she discusses (such surgical procedures to correct blinding vision problems, and the subsequent adjustment period for the patients) will truly astound you.
There are two distinct types of writing included in this book. In some passages, Dillard shares personal anecdotes with narrative that is full of wit, charm, and personality. These stories are what makes the book worth reading. The other type of writing is deeply introspective, she is self-analytical to a sometimes painful degree. It does reveal that there is a surprisingly thoughtful, complex person underneath the childlike observer that she often appears to be, but it gets extremely tiresome after a while, and sometimes she gets so wrapped up in the loose associations and ramblings that it borders on being bizarre. At those times, all I could think was "Come back to Earth, Annie!" But again, some readers may appreciate this aspect of the book, since it does reveal a deep part of her character, and gives valuable insight into many internal issues that all of us face.
If the personal anecdotes are the good parts of the book, the wild abstract self-analysis is the bad, then the ugly is definitely the Giant Water Bug. Read the book and find out what I'm talking about.
Overall, I recommend this book to anyone who is 1) a nature lover, 2) appreciative of extensive figurative language and sometimes bizarre metaphors, or 3) planning on taking an AP Lang. and Comp. class (it will give you an idea of all the literary elements you'll be covering in the class). And as many previous student commentators have noted, after one has endured Thoreau's "Walden", this book is definitely a welcome relief

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Summary: Love for Nature
Review: Just before Spring Break, our AP Language & Composition class began reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as an assignment to boost our written and spoken language. Previous to this assignment, we had read Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Walden was much scientific in letting us know that Thoreau loves to be in nature and with nature, whereas Pilgrim at Tinker Creek employs immense figurative language in order to help the audience appreciate nature and surroundings in a manner of awe. Both the authors love nature and include various literary tools (you know the screw driver, the hatchet, etc) just to let us know how much do they benefit by being in nature. Metaphors, similes, telegraphic sentences, parallel structure, allusions are just few of these tools. One can infer that Dillard has a library of literary tools in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Both authors are extremely well educated and it is shown through their various allusions and references. Along with other allusions, Dillard includes a lot of biblical allusions about Jacob and his relationships. Both authors have skillfully crafted their admirations for nature in Walden and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

In places Dillard is humorous and also shocking. Humor: "...I discovered that I was in danger of joining the hawks on a vertical migration of my own..."
Shock: "Sometimes an Eskimo would catch a wolf with a knife. He slathered the knife with blubber and buried the hilt in snow or ice. A hungry wolf would scent the blubber, find the knife, and lick it compulsively with numbed tongue, until he sliced his tongue to ribbons, and bled to death."

I recommend you read Walden first just to get better acquainted with these novels. Then get ready to enjoy a refreshing and replenishing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I would say that I loved both books equally because of Thoreau's widespread allusions and Dillard's wide variety of figurative language. Both books are truly a love for nature.

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Summary: The Inspiration of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Review: Upon the completion of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I have to admit that I enjoyed it more than I thought was possible for an assignment for AP Language and Composition. However, after the intense pain suffered because of the dense chapters of Walden (which the class read before PatTC), Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was quite refreshing and inspiring.
Annie Dillard is indeed a skillful writer and this is evidenced on practically every page of the book. Dillard would have considered it the unpardonable sin if she had not included a similie or metaphor on every page of her book or if she had not used the full circle effect in each of her chapters.
Dillard exhibits that she is very knowledgeable and well-read by her numerous references to books and many Biblical allusions. For example, she alludes to Jacob wrestling with the angel as told in the book of Genesis.
One cannot deny that Dillard is a skillful writer. The anecdotes, telegraphic sentences, figurative language, and allusions are pieces of evidence for this. (Just to name a few!)
Dillard's questions and observations really do produce inspiration for the reader.

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Summary: Intricacy, Intricacy, Intricacy defines Dillard
Review: I read Pilgram at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard in my AP Lang&Comp class. If I saw Pilgram at Tinker Creek on a bookshelf in the public library I would probably pass it by. Annie Dillard filled her book up with scientific facts, similes, and more facts about nature that I cared to know. Pilgram at Tinker Creek did not contain as much information as Thoreau's Walden and was a much easier read. Dillard did have her moments of being poetic. Mostly the book contained Dillard's love and respect for nature. Dillard's favorite books were nature books that brought her closer to nature. In Thoreau's Walden, he is all about simplifying his life and showing how nature is simple, where Dillard is more interested in learning everything about nature and she shows the reader that nature is all but simple, she even has a chapter titled Intricacy. I enjoyed reading Pilgram at Tinker Creek far more than reading the mind-boggling nature information of Walden. Annie Dillard truly captures how complex nature is and she shows us how we should stop and absorb the beauty around us.

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Summary: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek A Bit More Than a "Mental Ramble"
Review: In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard there is everything from massive philosophical questions to three page anecdotes about mosquitoes feeding on snakes. Much of the beauty contained in this book lies in Dillard combining both portions in a single chapter and still managing to add five or six similes minimum per page. The philosophical questions are intriguing to ponder, yet all she could do was offer them to the reader. Dillard is no philosopher and if you are seeking to find "actual" answers then look somewhere else. Similarly, for a non-scientist Dillard seemed to have intense amounts of nature knowledge (and was eager to share every fact) but a feeling persisted that some of her natural questions could be answered by actual scientists. This is more than likely an unfair generalization about Annie Dillard. The assumption that she was delving into questions far over her head (as well as nearly everyone else's) probably arose because she failed to spend an extra ordinate amount of time telling the reader how intelligent she is, at least, in comparison to Thoreau in Walden. After the derivation of this conclusion I looked to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek more for the beauty of the writing. The fact that I would almost fall asleep at times belies more the fact that the writing was symmetric, beautiful, and flowing rather than boring. Yet, at other spurts the writing was intense and, unconsciously, I would sit straighter and furrow my brows as I read.
(...)

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Summary: Challenging Outworn Notions of the Natural World
Review: Annie Dillard is one of my favorite authors. She writes beautifully and clearly, and very thoughtfully. In Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, she discusses the art of seeing, and specifically of examining the natural world to find out what it really is. In the process, she challenges and updates the Transcendental notion that God can be understood through his creation. In this manner, Dillard demonstrates she is not just a student of Thoreau's. She actually does him one better.

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Summary: For Those of Us who've meditated Too Far and Too Long. .
Review: to put up with cliched glorification of Nature's Glory-- yeah, like this one. This book is our safety net-- with a few thorns woven in to keep us awake. Quite a few thorns.

I think Annie Dillard just might be a saint, a prophet or the latest Buddah.

This is a book on learning how to see. Not just what we want to see, not just what we believe we should see, but All of It, the Divinity, Diablery or just Cussed Contrariness of Nature, real nature,the one we actually live in and eventually have to make our peace with. Is it a world of grotesques, miracles, hideous deaths, futile if occasionally lovely lives. Well, yes, all of it. Every last bit of imaginative creativity has gone into god's creation, which may make one sometimes wonder about the sanity of god.

That's why I specified that this is a book for those of us who have meditated and prayed ourselves into a corner where doubt or despair may seem the only way out. Annie Dillard takes us further into that corner, carefully, lovingly, furiously and shows us the only way out is acceptance. No, acceptance is not lively enough of a word. An embrace is our only hope, an abandoned empassioned embrace of this ultimately incomprehensible but eminently passionate creation.

No other book will take you there as far as you need to go. Read it at the beginning of your path, in the middle when the going gets boring, and at the end when hope starts to dwindle down to a trickle.

And, by the way, there is nothing disconnected or aimless about these essays. It is a perfectly crafted trial of the spirit.

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Summary: Amicable yet aimless stroll through Virginia's Blue Ridge
Review: Dillard describes herself as "a wanderer with a background in theology and a penchant for quirky facts." Published thirty years ago, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" is a pleasant if somewhat aimless journal that combines a rather jejune spirituality with lots of those "quirky facts"--anecdotes and observations that flavor the accounts of her wanderings through the fields, meadows, and woods surrounding her home. Monitoring a flood caused by a hurricane, stalking an unwary muskrat, tracking the life cycle of a mantis--little escapes her attention, and she supplements her explorations with fascinating tidbits she has gathered from her readings. Although the book ostensibly cycles through the seasons, from winter through summer and back again, her recollections are randomly presented, if organized very loosely by theme.

I'll add my two cents to the Dillard vs. Thoreau debate. While many readers--especially high school students--don't see much of a resemblance (mostly because Dillard is so much easier to read), Dillard herself invites comparison by mentioning Thoreau's work half a dozen times. Her style, like Thoreau's, is informal, and her powers of observation are keen. Yet, in my view, there is one important difference between the two writers: Dillard appears to have no interest with the human issues that preoccupied Thoreau: race relations, political activism, egalitarianism--and even environmentalism. In this book especially, Dillard rarely strays from "nature writing," with the exception of a few short passages pondering the role of the "creator" and the place of humans in the universe and one ill-conceived section in which she mangles quantum physics in metaphorical support of some insights on "mysticism."

Many readers are enamored by Dillard's prose style, and I will confess to bafflement on this point. All too often, she abandons understated lyricism for Hemingway-inspired simplicity: "It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay." "It is early March." "It is spring." "Now it is May." "It's summer... It's summer now: the heat is on. It's summer now all summer long." "In September the birds were quiet." As with Hemingway's work, Dillard's writing can sometimes be elegant in its simplicity, but just as often, I found that she had forsaken the realm of the simple for the simplistic (and even the simple-minded). The paucity of her own prose becomes most apparent when she quotes or paraphrases other authors (such as Edwin Way Teale, whose book on insects provided much of the source material for the mesmerizing episodes in her chapter on "Fecundity").

Dillard confesses that she is "not a scientist"--and she is certainly not a philosopher. Her abstract musings are unsophisticated; the chapter on "The Present," for example, is notable for its fuzziness: "What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration." During passages like these, Dillard is no longer serving up pop metaphysics, she's unabashedly belaboring the obvious.

More than a few readers and critics have accused Dillard's works of being hollow and pointless, but I'm not sure I would go that far; her books do contain some beautiful and consequential descriptions. Yet, ultimately, it's a matter of taste: I prefer the meatier, methodic, thesis-driven, grounded works of such writers as Rachel Carson, John McPhee, Diane Ackerman, and (yes) Thoreau to Dillard's sauntering diaries.