Book 102: Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

This book by Annie Dillard took me a long time to read. It's not because I didn't enjoy it, but just because it's a book best savored. I'm so out of the habit of quickly reading and digesting serious material that I have to read slowly and break it up into smaller installments. I can still read easy fiction at hyper-speed, just not serious books.

I first read this book about 10 years ago, and I liked it then, and I liked it this year. Dillard lived for a year in Virginia, near Tinker Creek. She read and walked around and looked at nature and thought. Doesn't that sound great? It was the '70s, so she surely wasn't as addicted to technology as many of us are these days -- it wouldn't have felt quite so foreign to live more in nature.

Dillard tells little stories about nature and Nature and science and God and horrors and beauty. Her prose is just right to reflect a young woman who is extremely excited about life and science and nature. This book won the Pulitzer Prize.

Some of my favorite parts:

* She tells of a man who measured the pressure exerted by a growing squash. It was 5 thousand pounds per square inch! It made me wonder if the pressure of a growing baby is the same, but of course we could never hook a baby up to a machine to measure the pressure exerted by its growing body. Dillard makes you think of weird experiments. You won't be able to help it.

* She writes of human beings, "Our excessive emotions are so patently painful and harmful to us as a species that I can hardly believe that they evolved." If we were all lobotomized, we could all be happy.

* Here's a perfect line, "I felt a rush of such pure energy I thought I would not need to breathe for days."

* On navel gazing: "I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves."

* I love her description of a muskrat-watching adventure, in which she is lying on a bridge close to the water, trying not to move when the animal can see her, but rolling back and forth to watch him as he swims back and forth under the bridge. "All this time I was not only doing an elaborate about-face every time his eyes disappeared under the bridge, but I was also smoking a cigarette." Ah, the 1970's when cigarettes and nature could be combined without irony!

I love Annie Dillard and highly recommend her books.