Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Deckle Edge Author: Visit Amazon's Annie Dillard Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0061233323 | Format: PDF
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Deckle Edge Description
Review
The precision of individual words, the vitality of metaphor, the sheer profusion of sources, the vivid sensory and cerebral impressions all combine to make Pilgrim at Tinker Creek something extravagant and extraordinary. --Kirsten Backstrom, 500 Great Books by Women
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a series of essays that combines scientific observation, philosophy, daily thoughts, and deeper introspection with glorious prose. --500 Great Books by Women
The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing....A reader's heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled. --Eudora Welty, New York Times Book Review
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
About the Author
Annie Dillard is the author of many works of nonfiction, including An American Childhood and Teaching a Stone to Talk, as well as the novels The Living and The Maytrees.
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- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics (June 12, 2007)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0061233323
- ISBN-13: 978-0061233326
- Product Dimensions: 8 x 6.6 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
I read this book every ten years or so. It may well be my favorite; it's right up there, anyway. (At my age, picking a favorite book is dangerous: I've probably forgotten about half the strong candidates.) It is, if you will, a connected series of "nature" essays. Each one is strong, and can stand alone, but all are bound by many threads into a larger whole.
Annie Dillard moved to Tinker Creek, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, in her mid-twenties (or, at any rate, this book achieved final published form when she was twenty-nine). Like Thoreau, she came to the woods to "keep a meteorological journal of the mind". Indeed, "Walden" is the model: a person of reflective tendency steps out of the stream of life, as it were, to go to the woods, just to see what he or she can see. It turns out that one's own mind is a large part of the scenery when one gets away from the rough-and-tumble of society. Big mysteries are at stake here; it is somehow appropriate that looking with all attention at minute creatures and giving oneself over momentarily to ephemeral events provide clues. Why is nature cruel? Why is there beauty? Could these be related?
I put it baldly, but these and other questions are more the expression on her writing's face than the subject of it. There are details, and funny descriptions, and a rifling through the wonders of her library of naturalists. But, always, there is a person doing all this: walking, having a sandwich, creeping up on a copperhead for a closer look (after patting her pocket to make sure the snakebite kit is there), or just lying in bed remembering a horrifying or glorious experience of that particular day, in the woods, on the banks of Tinker Creek.
Have I mentioned the quality of the writing? It's glorious.
I was assigned to read Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for my AP English III class. We had just finished reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden, or Life In The Woods a few weeks prior, and our teacher had told us that Dillards writing style was similar to Thoreau's. Now, I'm not a big Thoreau fan (as my test grade proves), so this was not consoling to me. Over spring break I picked up the book and began to read it. She starts simply "I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my head in the middle of the night and land on my chest." From that sentence on, I was hooked. There are two parts to this book, a via positiva, and a via negativa. The beginning is filled with life, positive imagery, and numerous quotes from Thoreau and van Gough. Dillard covers her perspectives on Heaven and earth, seeing, winter, and "the fixed" in this section using such qualities as listed before. The via negativa begins somewhere in
chapter five or six. It creeps in, slowly taking over the positive images and feelings, until you finally find that you are reading about children abusing newts in a state park, or caterpillars walking in the same circle around the same vase for seven full days, because their leader was taken away without their knowledge. Death is a reoccurring theme here. A main question in my class was what happened to make her change styles? Was it planned, or was it the effect of some event--the death of a friend or loved one perhaps? Either way, we read on through the spring and summer, and into the fall. She leads us into a flood, where she says, "I like crossing the dam. If I fall, I might not get up again...I face this threat every time I cross the dam, and it is always exhilarating.
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