Fiery Nature, Fierce Theology, Fantastic God
Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I’ll begin by saying that this book is eye-opening and mind-awakening—in the very rare sense that, if you are wondering what life is like, how the world is, you had better read it. An audacious, feverish devotion to sense experience fuels Dillard’s work. She takes a concerted, vehement wonder, and fastens it over a gritty network of empirical facts.
I’ve found few authors who capture the taste and texture of the world like Dillard. Creation leaps into sharp relief, this wild, weird, vivid and deadly order which we all inhabit, and usually fail to notice. As Dillard observes, “Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.”
Dillard apparently reversed this ritual human regression and devoted herself to several years of lavish, unrestrained noticing:
“When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head. Some days when a mist covers the mountains, when the muskrats won’t show and the microscope’s mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.”
She takes a working knowledge of theology, philosophy, natural science, and physics, and goes to work reading the world. The 'notes' from her observations are presented in beautiful, and often ferocious, prose.
I found Dillard’s “Afterword to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition” very helpful in revealing the approach behind her writing. She writes,
“Neoplatonic Christianity described two routes to God: the via positiva and the via negativa. Philosophers on the via positiva assert that God is omnipotent, omniscient, etc.; that God possesses all positive attributes. I found the via negativa more congenial. Its seasoned travelers…stressed God’s unknowability… Thinkers on the via negativa jettisoned everything that was not God; they hoped that what was left would be only the divine dark.”
Thus, in terms of arrangement, the first half of the book tends more toward euphoric creation studies, poetic and scientifically precise—while the later chapters dwell on the horrific practices we find everywhere in nature, “that it is death that is spinning the globe.”
In Dillard’s fascination with ubiquitous death, and her battle to rectify it with divine love, I found a fascinating parallel to George MacDonald, though the styles of the two authors differ dramatically. Remarkable, to my mind, is that C.S. Lewis’ comment on MacDonald’s Phantastes could be almost equally applied to Tinker Creek: “The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live.”
My final observation, which I draw out as an admitted lover of Lewis and Tolkien, is that Dillard has an overt love for true north—the arctic wastes, cold brightness, dark distances, a kind of soul-shriving emptiness. She longs to stand on an ice pack and gaze through layers of nebulae, the world falling away.
Annie Dillard speaks of “northing,” and for her the sensation is triggered by thoughts of Eskimos and geese and dancing specks of ice. Here I found an unexpected overlap of minds, a cross-pollination of ideas and loves. I wonder if Dillard’s northing, her desire to stand at the apex of the world and watch stars wheel, is similar in kind to the love of “northerness” that Tolkien and Lewis shared, and the sharp, bright stories of William Morris—say, The Wood Beyond the World. Lewis remarked that, "No mountains in literature are as far away as distant mountains in Morris."
One wishes to escape life’s tangled confusion, and stand on the edge of pure, piercing beauty, even if death or danger is a bridge on the way. We'd like to blaze a trail to an enchanted forest or, in Dillard's terms, an arctic pole.
Dillard finds the distant axis through National Geographic-like surveillance and lab-work. She studies insect and ice caves and wishes she could walk all the way home to true north. In a way, I find this shocking, because I would not necessarily take Dillard’s route to arrive where she does. But arrive I certainly want to. Many of us do, even as we grapple with the painful necessity of, for the next 70 years or so, staying put. We hope to get there in the end, all of us. Both scientists and dreamers.
Apparently there is more than one road.
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Present on the Master Book List.
6 comments:
I love that book and have read it several time. Reading your post, I've decided to read it yet again this summer!
I meant to write "several times," not "several time"!
Congratulations from the Wheelers! We enjoyed reading all about Aidan tonight. :-)
Sounds like a fascinating book. You've definitely prodded me to want to read it! I'll have to see if I can pick up a copy...
Ah yes, I too have been reading this book over and over again since I first picked it up freshman year of college - every time I read it I feel like a bell struck
I read this book last week for a class, and I must say: Fantastic! I use Post-It notes in books I'm reading to take notes about specific parts that I find cool and might want to use in an essay, but had to stop when I realized I was wasting an entire tree worth of Post-Its.
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