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Title: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard ISBN: 0-06-095302-0 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 28 October, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.88 (147 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: For Those of Us who've meditated Too Far and Too Long. .
Comment: to put up with cliched glorification of Nature's Glory-- yeah, like this one. This book is our safety net-- with a few thorns woven in to keep us awake. Quite a few thorns.
I think Annie Dillard just might be a saint, a prophet or the latest Buddah.
This is a book on learning how to see. Not just what we want to see, not just what we believe we should see, but All of It, the Divinity, Diablery or just Cussed Contrariness of Nature, real nature,the one we actually live in and eventually have to make our peace with. Is it a world of grotesques, miracles, hideous deaths, futile if occasionally lovely lives. Well, yes, all of it. Every last bit of imaginative creativity has gone into god's creation, which may make one sometimes wonder about the sanity of god.
That's why I specified that this is a book for those of us who have meditated and prayed ourselves into a corner where doubt or despair may seem the only way out. Annie Dillard takes us further into that corner, carefully, lovingly, furiously and shows us the only way out is acceptance. No, acceptance is not lively enough of a word. An embrace is our only hope, an abandoned empassioned embrace of this ultimately incomprehensible but eminently passionate creation.
No other book will take you there as far as you need to go. Read it at the beginning of your path, in the middle when the going gets boring, and at the end when hope starts to dwindle down to a trickle.
And, by the way, there is nothing disconnected or aimless about these essays. It is a perfectly crafted trial of the spirit.
Rating: 3
Summary: Amiable yet aimless stroll through Virginia's Blue Ridge
Comment: Dillard describes herself as "a wanderer with a background in theology and a penchant for quirky facts." Published thirty years ago, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" is a pleasant if somewhat aimless journal that combines a rather jejune spirituality with lots of those "quirky facts"--anecdotes and observations that flavor the accounts of her wanderings through the fields, meadows, and woods surrounding her home. Monitoring a flood caused by a hurricane, stalking an unwary muskrat, tracking the life cycle of a mantis--little escapes her attention, and she supplements her explorations with fascinating tidbits she has gathered from her readings. Although the book ostensibly cycles through the seasons, from winter through summer and back again, her recollections are randomly presented, if organized very loosely by theme.
I'll add my two cents to the Dillard vs. Thoreau debate. While many readers--especially high school students--don't see much of a resemblance (mostly because Dillard is so much easier to read), Dillard herself invites comparison by mentioning Thoreau's work half a dozen times. Her style, like Thoreau's, is informal, and her powers of observation are keen. Yet, in my view, there is one important difference between the two writers: Dillard appears to have no interest with the human issues that preoccupied Thoreau: race relations, political activism, egalitarianism--and even environmentalism. In this book especially, Dillard rarely strays from "nature writing," with the exception of a few short passages pondering the role of the "creator" and the place of humans in the universe and one ill-conceived section in which she mangles quantum physics in metaphorical support of some insights on "mysticism."
Many readers are enamored by Dillard's prose style, and I will confess to bafflement on this point. All too often, she abandons understated lyricism for Hemingway-inspired simplicity: "It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay." "It is early March." "It is spring." "Now it is May." "It's summer... It's summer now: the heat is on. It's summer now all summer long." "In September the birds were quiet." As with Hemingway's work, Dillard's writing can sometimes be elegant in its simplicity, but just as often, I found that she had forsaken the realm of the simple for the simplistic (and even the simple-minded). The paucity of her own prose becomes most apparent when she quotes or paraphrases other authors (such as Edwin Way Teale, whose book on insects provided much of the source material for the mesmerizing episodes in her chapter on "Fecundity").
Dillard confesses that she is "not a scientist"--and she is certainly not a philosopher. Her abstract musings are unsophisticated; the chapter on "The Present," for example, is notable for its fuzziness: "What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration." During passages like these, Dillard is no longer serving up pop metaphysics, she's unabashedly belaboring the obvious.
More than a few readers and critics have accused Dillard's works of being hollow and pointless, but I'm not sure I would go that far; her books do contain some beautiful and consequential descriptions. Yet, ultimately, it's a matter of taste: I prefer the meatier, methodic, thesis-driven, grounded works of such writers as Rachel Carson, John McPhee, Diane Ackerman, and (yes) Thoreau to Dillard's sauntering diaries.
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the greatest American nature classics
Comment: In my opinion, the three greatest nature classics of the last half of the twentieth century were A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC by Aldo Leopold, DESERT SOLITAIRE by Edward Abbey, and this remarkable book by Annie Dillard, PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK. The three authors make a fine study in contrast: a chain-smoking scientist, professor, and forester in Leopold; a shoot-from-the-hip anarchist, pagan, and provocateur in Abbey; and the poetical, contemplative, and religious Dillard. Leopold looks at nature and sees a self-contained ethical entity; Abbey looks at a mountain and sees merely a mountain; Dillard looks at a goldfish's fin and sees god.
I have to confess that in my own reading, I lean heavily towards dead people. It is not that I do not want to support living writers; I just am not always certain which writers are fads. The great virtue of dead authors is that they have withstood the test of time. I have made an exception over the years of Annie Dillard. She has a wonderful eye, a vivid imagination, a wonderful prose style, and can tease insight out of the most unlikely of sources. Although she has authored many wonderful books--TEACHING A STONE TO TALK, THE WRITING LIFE, LIVING BY FICTION, AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD--this early book remains in many ways my favorite. In it Dillard looks intently at nature, and wherever she looks she finds God.
The book on one level is a modern reiteration of the existence of God, the resurrection of the cosmological argument for his existence. I admit its power. Of the traditional arguments for the existence of god, I have never felt the power of the more celebrated ontological and teleological arguments. The latter I never felt especially compelling, while the former always seems to be a mental trick, hard for a newcomer to philosophy to refute, but an argument one instinctively feels to be bogus. But I admit that I have felt the power of moral arguments for God's existence (a two edged sword, since one can easily concoct argument's for God's nonexistence based on pain and suffering, as Ivan does so memorably in the "Rebellion" chapter in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV). But even atheistic thinkers have confessed the power of the cosmological argument, though it isn't an argument so much as a sensation created in us as we contemplate nature. Atheistic David Hume confessed it difficult not to imagine a Creator when observing the heavens, and the somewhat more religious Immanuel Kant proclaimed that two things filled his heart with wonder: the moral law within and the starry heavens above (and in both places he found a necessity for a deistical god).
Dillard, as she gazes about her in the Shenandoah Valley, finds many wondrous things to contemplate. She writes beautifully about all she looks at, and if she is sometimes mildly guilty of the anthropomorphizing that Edward Abbey railed so passionately against (a mountain doesn't "feel" anything, he argued; a mountain simpley "is"), she also writes about everything she looks at with a nontrivial prose that never takes anything for granted, and which is intent on giving every entity its due. Ultimately, she writes about God.
Although the book as a whole is remarkable, the highpoint for me are two extraordinary chapters, chapters that express the cosmological sentiment better than anything else I have ever read. The first of these is "Intricacy," in which she delves into the amazing complexity and diversity of the designs of nature. Her discovery is that nature doesn't tend towards simplicity, but to its opposite. As she gazes about, she concludes "Look, in short, at practically anything--the coot's feet, the mantis's face, a banana, the human ear--and see that not only did the creator create everything, but that he is apt to create ANYTHING. He'll stop at nothing." The other chapter I want to mention is "Fecundity," which ends up as a sort of Sheer Quantity Argument for the Existence of God. We think of evolution (a theory she wishes to embellish rather than deny) as being economical, tending towards simplicity. But Dillard is astonished at the sheer fecundity of nature, that "In a single cubic inch of soil, the length of the root hairs [of the rye plant] totaled 6000 miles." She is also cognizant of the maximal implications of cosmological arguments for believing in god: they point to a creator, but not to what kind of creator. As she puts it, "We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet." I delight in many of her conclusions as she regards nature. "Although it is true that we are moral creatures in an amoral world, the world's amorality does not make it a monster." Or, "Nature love the idea of an individual, if not the individual himself." The book is stuffed to overflowing with reflections like this.
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Title: Teaching a Stone to Talk : Expeditions and Encounters by Annie Dillard ISBN: 0060915412 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 September, 1988 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard ISBN: 0060915439 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 September, 1988 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: An American Childhood by Annie Dillard ISBN: 0060915188 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 September, 1988 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Writing Life by Annie Dillard ISBN: 0060919884 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 26 September, 1990 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Learning True Love: How I Learned and Practiced Social Change in Vietnam by Chan Khong, Cao Ngoc Phuong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ngoc Phuong Cao ISBN: 0938077503 Publisher: Parallax Pr Pub. Date: September, 1993 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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