Gazing at a terrible beauty

This is no ordinary book of nature writing, but is actually a deep dive into the wild and the unforgiving.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek begins with a description of a cat the book’s author, Annie Dillard, used to once own. An old tom that used to jump through the open window in the middle of the night on to her chest and wake her, “stinking of urine and blood”. This was my first inkling that what I had in my hand was no ordinary book of nature writing, but one willing to look beyond the romance of landscapes and animal life and dive deep into wild, bloody and unforgiving beauty.

The other memorable passage from the book that has stayed in my mind all these years later is a description Dillard gives of watching a small green frog being eaten alive by a giant water bug. “…it was a monstrous and terrifying thing” she says for her to watch (and for the reader to read).

To give it the simplest possible summary, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a journal of observational writing that Dillard made around the creek near her home in Virginia. The book was the second of Dillard’s to be published, after a volume of poetry. It is impossible not to compare this work to Henry David Thoreau’s classic of American Literature, Walden. Dillard had, in fact, written about Thoreau in her graduate studies thesis.

But to call Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (which was written by the 28-year-old Dillard in 1973, published the next year and went on to win her a Pulitzer in ’75) just nature writing would not do it justice. It examines philosophical and religious thought even as the wildlife around the creek are subjected to Dillard’s steady and unwavering gaze.

In the 25th anniversary edition of the book that I have, Dillard has written an afterword in which she speaks about what inspired her to write it. She’d been camping in Arcadia National Park in Maine in 1972 and was reading a nature book by a writer she’d much admired. But this was not a good book — it treaded on tired, familiar ground. Many months later and after searching for inspiration, she hit upon the idea of writing “a theodicy” or a vindication of the divine. Dillard is one of the few modern masters of literature who have not shied away from a religious identity and theistic beliefs.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek itself, according to Dillard, is based upon the two routes to god as described in Neoplatonic Christianity: via positiva and via negativa. Given the theological underpinnings of her writing, it would be unfair to dismiss Dillard and her masterpiece as just Christian literature. In fact, the book references a diverse range of religious beliefs from Buddhism to Islam. Dillard herself has been described as a transcendentalist in the tradition of Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In 1998, the Modern Library put Pilgrim at Tinker Creek on its list of 100 best non-fiction books — a testament to the enduring power of Dillard’s writing to move and inspire.

The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

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