A Review of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a novel of complex beauty that both repulses and attracts, provoking awe and bewilderment in the Reader. Annie Dillard reveals our world as it is from a close up look through nature, adding more details and complexity then is often allowed in our understanding of it.

In this novel, nothing happens. It is not a page-turner driving your interest by what will happen next but rather like an informative article that reveals information by stages because it cannot say it all at once. Though unfolding through the course of a year, through changing seasons and moods, all of these are merely descriptions as the world is – not how it was or will be but how it is and perhaps always will be.

Annie Dillard creates a snapshot of the world as seen through the lenses of an intensely observant eye that struggles to understand what he sees, offering possible interpretations that struggle to be faithful to every observation. Annie Dillard’s protagonist explores the world outside of human civilization, the world weather and landscapes, of plants and animals, and is overwhelmed and amazed by what he finds. The book sometimes reads like a science textbook, sometimes like a treatise on morality, God, and the nature of Dasign, but almost always like poetry.

Both the world described and the language used are grandiose in every sense of the word. There is no doubt that this work is impressive and magnificent, a work of meticulous devotion and personal expression. Sometimes however, the poetic underpinnings of Dillard’s writing that often align the beauty of the work with the world it describes, sometimes seems to be forced and interfere with the readers immersion into the subject of the book rather then the means of its production.


Some thoughts from reading:

It is interesting to me that this book was written by a devout Catholic. Dillard certainly never pulls out any religious dogmatics, or apologetical conclusions leaving many question open. I would love to talk to her, instead of her character, about the difficulties in understanding the divine in a world that is so complex, or from a certain perspective, flawed. Or, in finding the sublime in a world that is obviously never quite the way we see it, with conflicting elements of life and death always at work. Is there really something true and good amongst, or behind, the infinite complexity that is even bigger then all that we see?

I thought it was interesting to see Dillard talk about morality as the human domain. In conservative Christian circles, which I happen to frequent, morality is often strictly divorced from humanity, who must be too thoroughly tainted by original sin or their total depravity. Instead morality is God’s territory, and so, revealed to us more in nature then in humanity.

This idea of the innocence of nature is thoroughly problematized by Dillard, and she points to the library, the centre of civilization and human thought, as the point from which moral wisdom emanates into the world, be it a portal to the divine or the existential creation of it however is left open. Anyway, I liked that.

There was one point on which the protagonist was conclusive which surprised me. It is a point on which I had been leaning one way, and then came to the same conclusion as the protagonist, but which I am not honestly sure of. Is he really so conclusive? Annie, are you sure? Alright, I apoligize. I always want to leave everything till the end, like a mystery writer who doesn’t even tell you that someone has died.

Annie’s protagonist concludes that beauty and ugliness are in opposition. That both are out there, and while they are always mixed and together. He says “I am not washed an 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, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them…” (added emphasis is mine). About this I have wondered. How can he be sure that “corruption is not the heart of beauty,” one of beauty’s “deep-blue speckles;” That the “frayed and nibbled fringe of the world is a tallith, a prayer shawl, the intricate garment of beauty.”

I remember when I decided that there was a distinct line to be drawn between good an evil, voicing it for the first time on a mountain in the Crowsnest pass, but I is only a guess. The protagonist knows the words of Huston Smith, the truth of which every philosopher of right and wrong is painfully aware of: “In nature the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be,” and no follower of Christ can pass over this question too quickly for there is no resurrection without death.

Turning to another curiously religious writer, I think of the words of Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa: “Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty co-eternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated…” Must we, as a character in one of Dinesen’s story suggests, learn to love snakes so that we can appreciate the gifts which God will give us?

There is more to think about in five pages of Annie Dillard’s work then I could possibly write here, so I will leave it at that.

“There are no more chilling, invigorating words than these of Christ’s, ‘Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead.’”

“I wonder how long I will be permited to luxury of this relative solitude. Out here on the rocks the people don’t mean to grapple, to crush and starve and betray, but with all the good will in the world, we do, there’s no other way. We want it; we take it out of each other’s hides; we chew the bitter skins the rest of our lives.”