Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. 

4/5 rating. 271 pages.

Book #37 of 2023. Read August 27, 2023.

Annie missed the opportunity to give this the subtitle “Meditations on (or maybe in) Nature”.

This is an absolutely beautiful book of prose. Reading this is no small undertaking if it is to be actually enjoyed and gotten the most out of. You have to read slowly and really experience the book. Annie seems to reveal all the small things around us both in nature and in our surroundings.

It’s impossible to read this and not be thankful for the overwhelming beauty of the living world around us. I feel like it is definitely most impactful if read in a nature setting of some type.

Some of it was super weird or even macabre. But the other portions of it were so profound and beautiful that the others just kind of flow past. Even just in the past few days of reading this, I feel more connected to nature as I notice the birds around me or the sounds of the insects. Give this a read, and hopefully you’ll gain some of that touch of nature and the equanimity that comes with it!

Some quotes:

“But there is another kind of seeing that involves letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.”

“I walk home exhilarated or becalmed, but always changed, alive.”

“Here was a new light on the intricate texture of things in the world, the actual plot of the present moment in time after the fall: the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling – not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land.”

“Come on, I say to the creek, surprise me; and it does, with each new drop. Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it. Waste and extravagance go together up and down the banks, all along the intricate fringe of spirit’s free incursions into time.”

“Somewhere, and I can’t find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’”

“The experimenters studied a single grass plant, winter rye. They let it grow in a greenhouse for four months; then they gingerly spirited away the soil – under microscopes, I imagine – and counted and measured all the roots and root hairs. In four months the plant had set forth 378 miles of roots – that’s about three miles a day – in 14 million distinct roots. This is mighty impressive, but when they get down to the root hairs, I boggle completely. In those same four months the rye plant created 14 billion root hairs, and those little strands placed end-to-end just about wouldn’t quit. In a single cubic inch of soil, the length of the root hairs totaled 6000 miles.”

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