Reviewed by Jes Burns

Popular convention dictates that books should be read at a steady pace, with the reader consuming pages with intellectual voracity, practiced analysis, and a critical mind. A single book of moderate length is thought to be fuel enough for a week, at the most two, at which time the reader should close the cover, draw his or her conclusions, and promptly move to the next book on the shelf.

Well, popular convention is a bunch of hooey. And if a reader subscribes to this sort of regimented reading, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek may induce a sensory overload by virtue of both its minutiae and its scope. Instead, a reader should approach the text with cautious indulgence, reading it during the course of a year. Hold off and read something less important until January. Then begin Pilgrim at Tinker Creek on the coldest day of the year – slowly read and reread. On the first day of every new season, sit quietly, alone, and read a few more chapters. Take a walk. Let the book carry you through the year; then perhaps, you will learn to see like Annie Dillard.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a chronicle of a year spent in the hills of Virginia. Almost every day Dillard would take a walk in the wooded area by her house and down to a small mountain stream. Here she would sit with a monk’s patience and look for the “tree with lights in it.” She wanted to experience the world as it for the first time. A newly sighted person would not know a tree if she saw it. Instead she would see contours of light and dark, an abstract, flat form, with none of the human intellectual and experiential trappings that are in place when most people see. “When I see this way I see truly…. I am the man who watches the baseball game in silence in an empty stadium. I see the game purely; I’m abstracted and dazed. When it’s all over and the white-suited players lope off the green field to their shadowed dugouts, I leap to my feet; I cheer and cheer.”

Along with the scientific journals Annie Dillard relies on for the fascinating and often grotesque details about the natural world, she also leans on religion and philosophy to make sense of it all. The result is a treatise on experience derived from heightened awareness and stillness.

Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was published 120 years after the publication of Thoreau’s Walden. It may be that American personal nature writing can be done memorably only every century or so – and arguably Dillard holds the title for the twentieth century. The fact that she is a woman is not insignificant; she paved the way for other female writers in the genre such as Terry Tempest Williams and Gretel Ehrlich. Dillard proved that women could be critically acclaimed and successful doing this sort of writing at a time when the barriers for women writers (especially non-fiction) were just beginning to crumble. This is not to say that Dillard’s work only resonates with other women – her Pulitzer proves this. And so do the thousands of readers who claim that Pilgrim at Tinker Creek changed their lives. It’s a rare book that can do this for so many people.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1975, but it didn’t get stellar reviews when first released. In the New York Times Book Review, Eudora Welty said of Dillard and her work, “Speaking of the universe very often, she is yet self-surrounded, and beyond that, book-surrounded. Her own book might have taken in more of human life without losing a bit of the wonder she was after. Might it not have gained more?” Many reviewers reproached Dillard for not living up to the standard set by Thoreau.

The writing in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is thick and lovely. The narrative is loose, hardly there at all, only in the passing of the seasons. Every fifth paragraph begs to be read again, but sections like those about parasitic wasps are so disturbing that it becomes difficult to achieve Dillard’s desired objectivity in seeing the natural world. Part biology and part philosophy textbook, part pure observation and part personal journal, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is somewhat overwhelming in its scope. But this is what makes the book amazing; Annie Dillard manages to overwhelm us by describing only her backyard. While on your journey through the pages, watch out for poisonous snakes, parasitic bugs, egg cases, giant waterbugs and muskrats. But above all, just remember to read slowly.