I
dimly remember reading Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek back in the
70s. Recently, seeing excerpts and
hearing gushing praise, I decided to have another look. One her website, Dillard has written the
following, “I can no longer travel, can't meet with strangers, can't sign books
but will sign labels with SASE, can't write by request, and can't answer
letters. I've got to read and
concentrate. Why? Beats me. // Please don't use Wikipedia. It
is unreliable; anyone can post anything, no matter how wrong. For example, an article by Mary Cantwell
misquotes me wildly. The teacher in me
says, "The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts." Here is some information for scholars. (I’ve posted this web-page in defense; a
crook bought the name and printed dirty pictures, then offered to sell it to
me. I bit. In the course of that I learned the web is
full of misinformation. This is a
corrective.)
My
twenty-fifth-anniversary edition also has a blurb by Eudora Welty, who
describes the work better than I can.
Welty writes, “The book is a form of meditation written with headlong
urgency about seeing, A reader’s heart must go out to a young
writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled. […] There is an
ambition about her book that I like […] It is the ambition to feel.” That is precisely the effect Pilgrim had on me.

I
marked numerous passages and selecting good examples was no easy task. I loved the one about pennies, and it struck
me that my habit of up picking coins of all sorts might have begun when I first
read Dillard. Here is another of my
favorites, “This is the sort of stuff I read all winter. The books I read are like the stone men built
by the Eskimos of the great desolate tundra west of Hudson’s Bay. They still build them today, according to
Farley Mowat. An Eskimo traveling alone
in the flat barrens will heap round stones to the height of a man, travel until
he can no longer see the beacon, and build another. So I travel mute among these books, these
eyeless men and women that people the empty plain. I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I’m terrified that I’ll run out, that I will
read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep
awake” (44).
If it has been a
while since you walked with Annie Dillard, pick up Pilgrim at Tinker Creek slow down, stop and smell Nature. 5 stars.
--Chiron, 5/28/16
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