Book Review: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
I remember feeling a similar, resounding yes when I was reading Dylan Thomas last year. I long to write like that! I hope I write like that! I thought. and I have been thinking it again reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.
The prose is vibrant, raw and playful. Situated, attentive and rich in the murky death-remembering way — grand but not pure. Unapologetic! Intricate!
“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and 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”
She refers to the invigoration of self-forgetfulness. Those stretches of time in which you can be so absorbed in being. You might start with an intention to observe and sometimes, if you’re lucky, “you” get out of the way. Lucky isn’t it, maybe it takes practice. It takes practice, openness.
“You quit your seat in a darkened movie theatre, walk past the empty lobby, out the double glass doors, and step like Orpheus into the street. And the cumulative force of the present you’ve forgotten sets you feeling, staggering […] It all floods back to you. Yes, you say, as if you’d been asleep a hundred years, this is it, this is the real weather, the lavender light fading, the full moisture in your lungs, the heat from the pavement on your lips and palms — not the dry orange dust from horses’ hooves, the salt sea, the sour Coke — but this solid air, the blood pumping up your thighs again, your fingers alive. And on the way home you drive exhilarated, energised, under scented silhouetted trees.”
This book helps you remember these experiences, presence, in the ever-shifting reality of the word, and their importance. It nudges you, then starts tugging.
“All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees.”
“I retreat — not inside myself, but outside myself, so that I am a tissue of senses.”
In the afterward she acknowledged that,
“living in hiding would be cumbersome”
and that feels huge to me right now. Here I am, strange and sensitive and alive! I will try to meet you anew from that place in each moment.
P s. When I read Carol Anshaw’s description of Dillard’s language as “elegant and muscular” the thought that immediately popped into my head was, “that’s my gender !”. Now I need to do some press-ups. On the grass.
