I’ve wanted to read Annie Dillard for a few years but I’ve always been unable to find a physical copy. Luckily, I was recently inspired to look for her in Overdrive and I realised that the NLB has added a few of her books! I immediately borrowed Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I hear is the book that made her famous.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is book about Dillard’s time at Tinker Creek, nature’s oasis near her home. She endeavours to see, to really see, the world around her and from there, to divine what God is. The first half of the book is what she calls via positiva, that which “accumulates the world’s goodness and God’s”, followed by the second half, the via negativa in which philosophers “jettisoned everything that was not God; they hoped that what was left would be only the divine dark.”

What the book does is to bring you to a new way of seeing. In her second chapter, Dillard talks about blind patients seeing for the first time and describing the world as colour patches. She does the same to the reader – the world she lives in and sees is familiar but also novel and sometimes grotesque. What we miss, she sees and connects to other parts of life and other things that she’s read about.

The result is a magnificent book that hits you hard. In the afterword, Dillard talks of this book as a youthful work and mentions that her prose suffers from “youth’s drawback […]: a love of grand sentences, and fancied a grand sentence was not quite done until it was overdone.” The language is definitely lyrical but in my opinion, Dillard never loses control. The language is overdone because she is awed by what she sees, by what surrounds her and she vividly impresses upon the reader her observations. Language is her tool for communicating with us and she doesn’t let the language become the primary focus.

I loved reading this and I’m excited to read more of Annie Dillard’s works. It’s difficult to look at the world the same way after reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and I can only hope to have one-tenth of her ability to see. To end, I’ll leave you with this quote:

“When we lose our innocence – when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there’s death in the pot – we take leave of our senses. Only children can hear the song of the male house mouse. Only children keep their eyes open. The only thing they have got is sense; they have highly developed “input systems,” admitting all data indiscriminately.”

Seeing, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Featured Image: Photo by Me