Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

By: Annie Dillard

Narrated by: Nan McNamara

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. . . . There is an ambition about [Dillard's] book that I like. . . . It is the ambition to feel.” — Eudora Welty, New York Times Book Review

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, where Annie Dillard set out to chronicle incidents of ""beauty tangled in a rapture with violence.""

Dillard's personal narrative highlights one year's exploration on foot in the Virginia region through which Tinker Creek runs. In the summer, she stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall, she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays King of the Meadow with a field of grasshoppers. The result is an exhilarating tale of nature and its seasons.

An honest observation of the impossible paradox of life

To call this book provocative is an understatement! But I suspect Annie Dillard would agree.

This book is an essay of sorts on life. Your life. My life. The life and times of a frog which was undeservedly murdered by a giant water bug. Or did the frog have it coming? Was the giant water bug a mere consequence? A reaping so to speak of the frogs own savage eating habits?
You decide.

Can you read this book and remain unchanged? I doubt it. Can you read this book without crying out in indignation at the savage cruelty of nature? I sure can’t!

Despite my cries of indignation I must continue to be. I must continue to work at thriving. Thriving by means of all the creatures and plants I must consume to do so. For despite our objections to the obvious cruelty of nature, an honest assessment of our own behavior shows we are no better. Perhaps we can express gratitude for our eating and thereby express compassion for our food items.

For as the author noted: here we so incontrovertibly are.

It's a Classic for a Reason

This is a brilliant and inspiring book. Yes, Annie Dillard is a "nature writer," but she's also a mystic of sorts, and her ability to bring you along as she shifts from the macro to micro and back again is superb. She describes both the beauty and brutality of the natural world unflinchingly. I thought that the reader was "okay," not great. (Mispronouncing poet Arthur Rimbaud's name "Rim-bod"is hard to forget, but there were other minor annoyances.)
My approach to reading Pilgrim was to alternate between listening and actual reading, often listening to what I read and vice versa.
Today, the author is somewhat dismissive of this book, preferring others she wrote. I will surely ead some of her other books, but I regard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as a masterpiece.