“Never lose a holy curiosity” Einstein once said. That is one of the dozens of valuable quotations a reader will glean from Annie Dillard’s highly regarded book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (first published in 1974) which won her the Pulitzer Price for General Nonfiction. Apart from Einstein, Dillard also engages the thoughts of sages as diverse as Werner Heisenberg and Julian of Norwich in between her beautifully lyrical prose about the wonders of nature in the small and in the large. Part naturalist and part metaphysician, Dillard describes herself as “a wanderer with a background in theology and a penchant for quirky facts.” And in this book, she leaves no stones unturned as she explores the many faces of nature in her neighborhood – a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge – that boasts a creek teeming with life and wonder, vibrant with monarch butterflies, muskrats and water beetles the size of large spiders. For days on end, she pokes her nose into virtually every visible corner of this universe, recording the passing glories of the seasons and nature’s enduring beauty and violence in finely wrought prose that will nourish even the most jaded of souls. Her study of grasshoppers and praying mantises, her observations of newts and herons all demand heroic efforts of attention only those with “holy curiosity” can muster.
For an epoch defined by mass attention-deficit disorder, Annie Dillard’s book is a reminder of the grace and grandeur we are missing out. “The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But – and this is the point – who gets excited by a mere penny?” Dillard asks. It’s a good question, the answer to which may either edify or further alienate ourselves from nature, of which we are a part.
Excerpts from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
“If a day is fine, any walk will do; it all looks good.”
***
“I live by a creek. Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge … It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies.”
***
“I had read about the giant water bug, but never seen one. “Giant water bug” is really the name of the creature, which is an enormous, heavy-bodied brown bug. It eats insects, tadpoles, fish, and frogs. It’s gasping forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes its victim with these legs, hugs it tight and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the only bite it ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim’s muscles and bones and organs – all but the skin … The frog I saw was being sucked by a giant water bug. I had been kneeling on the island grass; when the unrecognizable flap of frog skin settled on the creek bottom, swaying. I stood up and brushed the knees of my pants. I couldn’t catch my breath.”
***
“That it’s rough here and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended bivouac. But at the same time, we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, ‘The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?’ It’s a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest?”
***
“Five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the gutter of a four-storey building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star. The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. There was no one else in sight. The fact of his fall was like old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
***
“I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But – and this is the point – who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple.”
***
“Can I stay still? How still? It is astonishing how many people cannot, or will not, hold still … but at the creek, I slow down, center down, empty … I find a balance and repose. I retreat – not inside myself, but outside myself, so that I am a tissue of senses. Whatever I see is plenty, abundance. I am the skin of water the wind plays over; I am petal, feather, stone.”
