Attain Pilgrim At Tinker Creek Imagined By Annie Dillard Conveyed As Booklet

narrator in sitelinkPilgrim at Tinker Creek expresses awe at the wonder of nature in four seasons in very poetic prose.
There were parts of the book that were exquisite in their beautiful phrasing, The narrator often had a playful voice when she described "stalking" creatures in the natural world at Tinker Creek, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia near Roanoke.


Annie Dillard is also seeing the Divine in nature, Looking at creation, which is often imperfect, she brings up many good questions about the nature of the Creator.
She sees pain, suffering, and death when predators have to kill creatures lower on the food chain to survive.
Using frogs, insects, barnacles, and other examples, she writes about how creatures must reproduce in great numbers in order for a few of them to survive, a rather inefficient means of creation.
Dillard asks, "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.
" Dillard often writes in a stream of consciousness as she puts down her thoughts about the presence of the Divine in nature, sometimes in awe and sometimes confused.
She asks very good questions about God, questions that people have been examining for thousands of years.
But her stream of consciousness thoughts were difficult to follow sometimes, and less successful than her observations about the natural world.
I had a mental picture of her writing late into the night, wrestling with her ideas about a Creator who is both benevolent and cruel.
The text is also sprinkled with quotes from naturalists, philosophers, and other writers,

The book is a good reminder to open our eyes, hearts, and minds to the wonders of nature.
Dillard expresses it well as she concludes her book, "And like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says 'Glory,' and my right foot says 'Amen': in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise.
" Only regret, I read it too fast, This book has been on my toread list since, It was recommended to me by a library patron, I was expecting a gentle book on nature, However, in truth, nature is not gentle, it is about adaptation and survival,

Frankly, some of the passages were more like something from a horror novel for me, such as the description of the silver eels crossing the field! Listening in the middle of the night in the dark due to another bout of insomnia added an additional element to my fear.
Consider the following:

"On cool autumn nights eels hurrying to the sea sometimes crawl for a mile or more across dewy meadows to reach streams that will carry them to salt water.
"

"There are too many to count, all you see is a silver slither like twisted ropes of water falling roughly.
A oneway milling and mingling over the meadow and slide to the creek, Silver eels in the night are barely made out seething as far as you can squint, A squirming jostling torrent of silver eels in the grass, "

Never in a million years would I have imagined that eels can travel across meadows, I am truly glad I have never come across such a sight!

Then there were the multitudes of grasshoppers, which seem a bit like a plague of locusts:

"The aired burst and whirred.
There were grasshoppers of all sizes, grasshoppers yellow green and black, short horned,

and long horned, slant faced, band winged, spur throated, cone headed, pygmy, spotted, striped and barred.
They sprang in salvos, dropped in the air, "

Finally, there is the fatalistic view of life going on and how truly replaceable we are:

"All the individual people I understood with special clarity were living at that very moment with great emotion in intricate detail in their individual times and places and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people one by one like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped in a neverending cloth.
"

Overall, a book that left me unexpectedly breathless, I love this book, but it frustrates me too, Maybe it's because Dillard was so young when she wrote it, But it doesn't deserve to be compared to Walden, Thoreau is arrogant and has a prescription for every one of society's problems, Dillard asks hard questions and agonizes over the answers, It's never an open and shut case for her, I'll read her books again and again, but I might be done with Thoreau, For its many moments of poignant beauty, I am glad to have read this Pulitzer Prizewinning memoir/diary of Dillard's single year spent exploring the natural world beyond her Blue Ridge Valley doorstep.
Those sections which placed me directly in view of the lives and deaths of insects, mammals, reptiles, avians, and plants of every description, were sublime.
I take similar delight in exploring "the great outdoors", so the best moments spoke powerfully to me.


Sadly there were three aspects of this book that prevented such instances of intense connection from occurring as often as they might have.
All are unique to the individual reader and so may not inhibit your own appreciation,

Because this is a memoir, the narrator is front and center most of the time.
And so she casts a shadow over much of the proceedings, interpolating herself into the pictures she paints and often obstructing the reader's gaze.
One doesn't see the copperhead on the sandstone rock without first seeing the narrator seated beside it.
One doesn't creep up to an oblivious muskrat without first following the narrator's "stalking" maneuvers and then being forced to peer over her shoulder to get a looksee.
There was more Pilgrim interpretation than there was Tinker Creek,

There are prolonged passages of philosophical musing delivered in effusive poetic utterances that confuse rather than inspire.
At such times the narrator's transcendent experiences did not resonate with me, and that was a disappointment.


"Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of things both great and small.
" Oooh. Ahhh What

"The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price, If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all.
" No you wouldn't. You can't even spy on a rodent from the bridge without smoking a cigarette,

"Intricacy means that there is a fluted fringe to the something that exists over against nothing, a fringe that rises and spreads, burgeoning in detail.
" Either share those mushrooms with me or stop talking,

Frequent references are made to the JudeoChristian viewpoint standard Western version as well as Kabbalism and Hasidism, including the use of direct Biblical quotations.
Dillard does also invoke Buddhism, but she mainly filters things through the lens of the Old and New Testaments.
Again, this places the narrator into the spotlight and for me Tinker Creek went dark during such contemplations.


There are somestar moments, to be sure, but also several that barely qualified asand which broke whatever spell had just been cast, so I'm giving this one

.
"The least we can do is try to be there, ”

"Nature is, above all, profligate, "

“Its impossible to imagine another situation where you cant write a book cause you werent born with a penis.
Except maybe Life With My Penis, ”

I got my copy of this at a used bookstore when passing through Staunton, VA a town right next door to Waynesboro, VA, where in the earlys, according to Dillard, starlings a bird introduced to America by one Eugene Schieffelin, whose hobby was bringing over all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare were so numerous "southwest Virginia is their idea of Miami Beach" that residents couldn't stand to go outside because of the stink.


There are many such anecdotes and observations in this book, compiled from various articles and journals that Dillard wrote about her life in Virginia's Roanoke Valley.
It's funny, as this excellentAtlantic sitelinkprofile explains, that what Dillard describes as her "anchorite existence" on Tinker Creek was actually a fairly prosaic suburban life circa midcentury in Roanoke, VA, where she attended Hollins College.
As Walden Pond not really all that wild was to Thoreau, so Tinker Creek ditto was to Dillard: an inspiration to "impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality.
" So, following in the tradition of America's great nature writers, Dillard largely invents the nature and the wilds in which she finds mystery.


I grew up near Virginia's Roanoke Valley, and this was one of the reasons I wanted to read this book: it's from my neck of the woods.
I also enjoy "nature writing" as a genre, and I think Dillard does it masterfully, As The Atlantic essay notes, in the time between graduating from Hollins and writing Pilgrim, Dillard had read dozens of male nature writers cutting the figure of "mythic frontiersman, the wild man, the true hermit" whose work was mediocre.
This is where the funny penis quote comes in, She realized she could "do better" and did,

At times, Dillard's sense of humor struck me as a sort of Christian version of Douglas Adams'.
She is exuberant about the profligacy of nature, its intricate beauty and fecund horror, its sheer improbability bordering on lunacy "anything goes.
" I enjoyed Dillard's humor and Heraclitean who provides the Pilgrim at Tinker Creek's epigraph observations about attention, seeing, light, energy, change, and the present.
I was less enthused by her overwrought sallies of Christian spiritualism and theodicy, Kao dostojna i dostojanstvena nastavljačica tradicijske linije Toroovog Valdena”, Eni Dilard je mapirala zadivljujuć svet, u kome taktovi pisanja prate ritmove životne sredine.
Da je neko drugo vreme i da su druge okolnosti, ova knjiga bi predstavljala uzorno delo, prema kome bi se ravnali svi oni koji žele da se bave nature writingom.
A presudna za ovu književnu vrstu nije tema, koliko način na koji se o njoj piše meditativno, lutalački i sa dobrom merom između esejizacije i iskustvenog.
A kad je već o iskustvu reč, krajnje je neuobičajeno kako je Eni Dilard pošlo za rukom da napiše delo koje donosi intimna, ali ne i lična iskustva.
Sled je uglavnom sasvim drukčiji kada čitamo, na primer, autobiografije minulih epoha, uglavnom se izdvajaju lični momenti, dok se intimni zaobilaze.
Iako stalno piše o sebi, mi začuđujuće malo npr, saznajemo o Dositejevom biću intime, I dok je Dositej želeo da pripovešću o svom životu pokaže kako je moguće postati prosvećeno biće, Eni Dilard, bez spominjanja autorskog ja, pokušava da oživi u nama, kroz gustu, lirsku bistrinu, zaboravljenu i zapostavljenu prvotnost prirode.
Iako joj, naizgled, malo šta ide u prilog da ne sklizne u preispoljni patos panpoetološkog misticizma u glorifikovanju prirode, ona preskače i tu moguću zamku i u svakoj rečenici nudi priliku za dragoceno usredsređen događajujeziku.


Ako je svet beskrajni šifrarnik, Eni ima dojavu za neke lozinke,

Deus sive natura,
I first read this perhaps ten years or more ago, Vividly I recall a comment from a friend in a book group, She questioned, "And just what was it that you liked about this book" Obviously, she didn't care for it at all which I have as difficult a time understanding as her question to me.
What didn't I like I savored the insights, the observations, the honesty, the growth and the reflections.
I loved the book. I also loved the author's way with words, Since that time I have purchased several copies and given them to friends who perhaps share and can understand my love affair with nature and simplicity.


This is due for a reread, . . and I know just where it is!,