Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Rating:
Summary: thoughtful & beautiful
Review: ...if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. -Annie Dillard

This Pulitzer Prize-winning book, describing Dillard's observations during one year at Tinker Creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, is consciously modeled on Thoureau's Walden, which was the subject of her Masters thesis. The essays collected here first appeared in everything from Harper's and The Atlantic to The Christian Science Monitor and Sports Illustrated. This variety of publications suggests something of the variety of ideas and topics that Dillard addresses, but only suggests. Dillard is something of a polymath, has described herself as spiritually promiscuous and reads voraciously. As a result, the events that she sees trigger wide ranging dissertations on a myriad of topics from Sufism to the Eskimos.

However, there is one unifying theme, Dillard's attempt to understand God and why life for some requires violent death for others. She was recovering from a severe bout of pneumonia at the time she wrote the book, and a sense of mortality suffuses every page. Ultimately, she seems to have determined that the beauty to be found in Nature is ample compensation for the pain and suffering that accompany it, if only we open ourselves to that beauty.

The book is framed by an admonition:

The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. 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.

and the following conclusion:

I think that the dying pray at the last not 'please', but 'thank you', as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.

By the end of this thoughtful, beautiful book, you are bound to agree with her conclusion.

GRADE: A

Rating:
Summary: Luminous, poetic and unblinking
Review: Brutally beautiful and insightful. Not a shred of sentimentality. But, I think as many of the "book reports" shown here indicate: it might be inappropriate as a school reading assignment. That this book is being forced down the throats of those who can't yet appreciate it is painful to me.

Pilgrim is written like fine poetry. I don't read many books more than once. I've read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek at least a dozen times and went on to enjoy Dillard's other books. This book is luminous! A jewel!

Rating:
Summary: This Book Taught Me How to See
Review: During the winter of 1979, I spent a semester of my junior year of college in the San Juan Islands, an off-campus program of Seattle Pacific University. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was one of our reading assignments. Another assignment was to spend A LOT of time in the woods observing and writing down our observations. This book and those few months changed me. Through reading "Pilgrim" I learned how to notice things. Little things. I went from becoming an arrogant, oblivious intruder on my environment, to a quiet, humble observer and partaker of my surroundings.

Rating:
Summary: This Book is Horrible.
Review: I had to read this book for an AP class, i don't recommend it to anyone unless you like books with a complete absence of plot or content. I could not finish the book, no matter how hard i tried.

Rating:
Summary: You should read this book
Review: If you are at all interested in this book, buy it. I would love to write a complete review for you, with a discussion of the subject matter, the writing style, and everything in-between, but I can't do it without commiting a tremendous disservice against the book itself. Simply put, this is one of the most beautiful books that I have ever read. Buy it and find out for yourself.

Rating:
Summary: This book is one of the worst I've read
Review: For summer reading going into my sophmore year of high school we were forced to read this book. It starts out with the author lying in bed (topless) and a peed-on bloody cat jumps in her window and scratches up her chest until she bleeds. Instead of the normal reaction, she goes over to her mirror, looks at her self and thinks " wow - my bloody chest looks like roses!" sound interesting to you? Then read it. I would definitely not reccomend it.

Rating:
Summary: Reverence in Irreverence
Review: This book is a fine liqueur to be cherished and savored and relished and sipped. Like Annie Dillard, I am a creekside person, and *Pilgrim* lived in my backpack for many months. But since that old paperback is dogeared and thermos-coffee stained, it's nice to have a new large-print edition that is easier on eyes that are no longer quite as sharp but just as hungry for these words.

It seems to me that this is a book about being a witness to creation. "...[B]eauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there." Ah yes. The very least that we can do is show up for the show, que no?

From the author's discovery of the "tree with lights" to her realization that "Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves" she treks up and down Tinker Creek looking for evidence of his presence. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In fact, he is everywhere. "...this is it, this is it" she crows, "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." but, on the other hand, "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...This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day."

The author inductively reasons from the biological, psychological and artistic real world to what God must be like. She treks around the creek, examining the flora and fauna of the creator's creation and the flora and fauna of human consciousness looking for him - looking for clues to his actual character. "The question from agnosticism," says Annie, "is, Who turned on the lights? The question from faith is, Whatever for?"

"Look again at the horsehair worm," she says, describing each form in more intricacy than I'm quoting here, "...an overwintering ball of fuzzing bees...a turtle under ice...the fruit of the Osage orange tree...convoluted as any human brain...at a rotifer...Look in short, at practically anything - the coot's feet, the mantis's face, a banana, the human ear - and see that not only did the creator create everything but that he is apt to create ANYTHING. He'll stop at nothing.

"There is no one standing over evolution with a blue pencil to say, 'Now that one, there, is absolutely ridiculous, and I won't have it.' If the creature makes it, it gets a 'stet.' Is our taste so much better than the creator's? Utility to the creature is evolution's only aesthetic consideration. Form follows function in the created word, so far as I know, and the creature that functions, however bizarre, survives to perpetuate its form. Of the intricacy of form, I know some answers and not others: I know why the barbules on a feather hook together, and why the Henle's loop loops, but not why the elm tree's leaves zigzag, or why butterfly scales and pollen are shaped just so. but of the VARIETY of form itself, of the multiplicity of forms, I know nothing. Except that, apparently, anything goes. This holds for forms of behavior as well as design - the mantis munching her mate, the frog wintering in mud, the spider wrapping a hummingbird, the pin processionary straddling a thread. Welcome aboard. A generous spirit signs on this motley crew."

"...the creator creates. Does he stoop, does he speak, does he save, succor, prevail? Maybe. But he creates: he creates everything and anything." "...Why so many forms?...The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here?" ...Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: the creator loves pizzaz."

*Pilgrim at Tinker Creek* is exultant, exuberant, erudite and elegant. I'd call the whole thing a prose poem. Dillard lets the left brain know what the right brain is doing. You can open the pages at any point, read a passage, and CELEBRATE! Not everyone can or wants to grok it, but if it's food for you, it's a rare gem of a book for you. You know who you are. I'd give it eight stars if eight were an option.

[e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, wonderful, give me more.
Review: Instead of searching the sky, singing song after song, or going to church services (or maybe as well as these things), Annie Dillard looks for God in what is around her. Her book is an attempt to figure out where she is -- and what that means.

She is constantly asking why. Why all this beauty? What's the point? Why all this variation -- really, a thousand species of moth? Is that necessary? Why all this intricacy? Why not just make things -- why makes things out of things made out of things, down through the smallest of inifinities?

Also, she asks the harder questions -- why fecundity? The utter race from life into death, the push to procreate... And all this death? Animals eat others, eat themselves, eat their mothers or their children. It's like 9,000 trains on a track that will only hold 3. Why is everything blemished somehow? Is nothing perfect? Why? Why why why?

If this book were only made up of the whys, it would be overwhelming and perhaps unreadable. But couched in and alongside incredibly powerful bits of prose describing and interacting with what is around her, it is bearable -- no, not just bearable, but wonderful.

Her prose is powerful. She is a poet writing sentences. Here is a gifted writer who has read widely, remembered much, asked lots of right and wrong questions, and who spills onto the page with power and verve. This book shocks, inspires, infuriates, and tickles the reader. I love it and will read it again and again.

A sample of her prose:

"I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whoe bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down. Simone Weil says simply, 'Let us love country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.'"

If you'd like to dicuss argue, or rant about this book with me, e-mail me at [e-mail]. But be nice.

Rating:
Summary: if you wanna read about nothing, this is your book
Review: English III AP just became a lot less interesting to me since being assigned this book. Often, people had compared Dillards style of writing to Thoreaus, of whom i am a fan. Thoreau, in his expository essay Civil Disobedience delivered a message not to be found elsewhere. So embarking upon Dillards Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, i found myself eager to begin. The first two chapters held my interest as Dillard put every day things into a new light. However, that is ALL she did throughout the whole book. Except, the deeper into the book you got, the more exotic the things became. She went from talking about what a penny means to a man to how a mantis lays eggs, how Eskimos skin people, to how a butterfly smells. Dillards book lacks a point. In 277 pages, she rambles on about nothing. It should be entitled the observer at tinker creek because all she did was observe. There is no interaction with humans, no dialogue (with the exception of the 5 pages where she talked to a snake), and no action. You can analyze the book to heaven, but reading it is a bore. i would only recomend this book to someone who lives in a Uni-bomber type environment who has nothing better to do than wait 2 hours to stare at nutrea than talk about it for 20 pages. PULITZER MEANS NOTHING

Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: This was an amazing book! I chose to read it for a project for school, but have enjoyed it so much that finishing it was almost painful. I wanted to keep each line as a quote in my head and treasure each thought that Annie Dillard states. This book has given me new sight into the possibilities of life and helped me to learn what it really means to see.