The World As A Miracle

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
By Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard does a Walden, only this time set in ‘70s Virginia. She describes a year in her life, living in a valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains next to Tinker Creek. She spends the year, observing the natural world around her -and there is much to observe in the creek and in the mountains – observing minutely, paying attention to the changing seasons, the light, the wind, the insects and the bugs, the muskrats and the birds, the fish and the snakes. She is a devotee of paying attention – to experiencing the present, ‘catching grace’ as she calls it, unselfconsciously, losing oneself in the tree, the bird, the cloud. It’s the only way to catch the ‘now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t’ quality of the natural world. ‘’A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves. These disappearances stun me into stillness and concentration; they say of nature that it conceals a grand nonchalance, and they say of a vision that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven veils.”

Dillard writes beautifully – her descriptions of nature are transcendent. In one passage she describes starlings going to roost, how they flew over her head, for over half an hour, how they ‘seemed to unravel as they flew, lengthening in curves, like a loosened skein…Into the woods they sifted without shifting a twig, right through the crowns of trees, intricate and rushing, like wind’, how it left her transfixed, ‘bashed by the unexpectedness of this beauty’. In another, she describes a stunning sugar maple tree in autumn –‘it was as if a man on fire were to continue calmly sipping tea.’ And in yet another, she describes the migration of the monarch butterflies – “The monarchs clattered in the air, burnished like throngs of pennies, here’s one, and here’s one, and more, and more. …It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the valley, like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, all the leaves of hardwoods from here to Hudson Bay. It’s as if the season’s colour were draining away like lifeblood, as if the year were molting and shedding.” Gorgeous, gorgeous prose.

Dillard is not just an observer of nature. She also reads extensively about the living world around her. It allows her to display a naturalist’s knowledge that deepens her engagement – she observes the praying mantis and gives us an insight into its mating habits; she tells us a newt can scent its way home from as far as eight miles; that the average size of all living animals, including man, is that of a housefly; that there are two hundred and twenty eight separate muscles in the head of a caterpillar. She has the ability to find the dramatic – the egg laying of the praying mantis, the abdomens of South African honey ants, a dragon fly’s enormous lower lip, a water bug draining the flesh of a frog…Dillard is amazed at the intricacy of creation and the variety of form, the utility of each of the forms – and we stand amazed with her.

And it’s not just the beauty. Dillard is as aware of the horror that goes hand in hand, and the ubiquitousness of death. “The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which everything, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die…The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age’. This is what we know. The rest is gravy.”

Annie Dillard was 28 years old when she wrote this (and when she won a Pulitzer for it). She writes with all the passion and intensity of that age, but it is never empty rhetoric. There is an underlying self-confidence, and a wisdom and gravitas that recalls the writings of Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver and of course, Thoreau.  As with the best of nature writing there is a deeply spiritual vein that runs through the work - Dillard quotes the Bible and the Koran and sees the world as a wondrously inventive creation.

It's a beautiful piece of work that Dillard has created, one to savour slowly and mindfully. There was a sense of loss when I finished it, but with so much of note taking and underlining, I am sure it will be a source of joy for years to come.