Beauty, God... and Kleenex
A classic of nature writing never fails to astonish: I'm reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Hi! I’m Hannah James, journalist, writer and editor, and this is where I review nature books, and think about nature-related topics out loud. Thanks for reading!
What I’m reading
Today feels an especially relevant day to think about nature writing. “For too long we have been waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature,” said the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, in the wake of the release of the UN Environment Programme’s Making Peace With Nature report. No argument here.
Annie Dillard’s work is the polar opposite of waging war on nature. Her most acclaimed book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, carefully and lovingly describes her own beloved patch of ‘wilderness’, which was simply the scrubby little creek below her suburban house in Roanoke, Virginia. (This was at a time - 1974 - long before the recent trend for finding nature in edgelands and beside motorways. Also worth noting: Dillard was just 28 when she wrote this book.)
Dillard’s subjects are light, and beauty, and God. (Although she describes her religion as “none” she is well-versed in the major religious traditions.) She counterpoints these vast, calm contemplations with minutely observed, lyrically written depictions of tiny moments in nature of both towering beauty and abject horror. Her unforgettable description of watching a frog on the edge of a pond collapsing into an empty skin, as, hidden below the waterline, a giant water bug is liquefying and eating it is followed a few pages later by a mockingbird’s plunge from a four-storey building, “an act as careless and spontaneous as the curling of a stem or the kindling of a star”.
“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.”
Not every natural encounter in the book has a handy conclusion attached, but this one does. Until Dillard came round the corner and saw the mockingbird, there was no one there to witness this aerial feat. And so, she thinks:
“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.”
Describing the ever-changing light on the nearest mountain, Dillard lays out her project:
“I propose to keep here what Thoreau called ‘a meteorological journal of the mind,” telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead.”
Her job, then, is to look.
“I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.”
Dillard’s prose is lucent and dazzling (and often drily funny), but her lyricism can veer into the abstruse. Grand abstract statements about the nature of God and of consciousness will inevitably put off as many as they attract. But she is utterly open, utterly fearless, utterly committed to communicating her experiences in nature with all the beauty and grace she finds there. And of course she is delightfully, realistically down-to-earth, too, as nature writers must be:
“My fingers were stiff and red with cold, and my nose ran. I had forgotten the Law of the Wild, which is, ‘Carry Kleenex.’”
She deals head-on with the stolen land she lives on, quoting Native American and Inuit custom and myth. And she engages with the landscape with great physical energy; always scrambling across log bridges, crawling under fences, putting her nose an inch away from mantis egg cases. Both her everyday experiences in nature and her occasional transcendental moments leave her dizzy, breathless, speechless, sleepless. It is not often perfect peace Dillard finds in nature; rather, a thrumming life force that rings through her:
“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
She deals, too, with the deflating aftermath of those transcendent moments, the paradox that those who turn to nature to find still moments of eternity must live in our own time-bounded world. She stops at a gas station after a day spent driving, dully staring at the road’s black asphalt. Standing out the front, stroking the owner’s puppy, she looks up.
“Before me extends a low hill trembling in yellow brome, and behind the hill, filling the sky, rises an enormous mountain ridge, forested, alive and awesome with brilliant blown lights… Shadows lope along the mountain's rumpled flanks; they elongate like root tips, like lobes of spilling water, faster and faster. A warm purple pigment pools in each ruck and tuck of the rock; it deepens and spreads, boring crevasses, canyons. As the purple vaults and slides, it tricks out the unleafed forest and rumpled rock in gilt, in shape-shifting patches of glow. These gold lights veer and retract, shatter and glide in a series of dazzling splashes, shrinking, leaking, exploding. The air cools; the puppy’s skin is hot. I am more alive than all the world.
This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. And the second I verbalise this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque, so much black asphalt.”
Still, she recovers: “Catch it if you can… You were lucky to get it in the first place.” And soon, she’s back for more:
“I’m in the market for some present tense… do you think I won’t sell all I have to buy it?”
Sure enough, she finds it where it always is: in her creek, in her own back yard.
“This is the now, this flickering, broken light, this air that the wind of the future presses down my throat, pumping me buoyant and giddy with praise… If I seek the senses and skill of children, the information of a thousand books, the innocence of puppies, even the insights of my own city past, I do so only, solely, and entirely that I might look well at the creek… It is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.”
If Dillard were a painter, she’d be equally adept at abstract splashes of colour, like the gas station moment above, and pin-sharp realism: the story of the maimed polyphemus moth (“a monster in a Mason jar”) will long live in my memory.
So many writers have followed Dillard in her blending of natural-history fact and personal experience of them (although she rarely lets slip the autobiographical details others often include), but the reason we still read her is because she is so simply brilliant. I can’t think of any writer who is quite so porous to the natural world, quite so self-effacing, quite so knowledgeable, quite so lyrical.
Dillard did it first, and she did it best.
I’ve just ordered a collection of her essays called The Abundance, and that is precisely the word for what I find in her writing. Its boundless generosity of beauty and of ideas echoes her vision of the natural world as an endless series of gifts, freely available if only you care to look for them.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was book #15 for 2021. I’ve also been reading:
Claire Thomas, The Performance
Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford
Rick Morton, My Year of Living Vulnerably
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