Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"I would imagine this book is the most familiar to Five Books people—it’s been recommended a bunch of times. I love reading books and read loads of them. But, to be honest, quite often they tend to go in one ear and out the other. I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when I was cycling through Siberia in the middle of winter 20 years ago, and it’s one of the few books that’s completely stuck with me. She lives in a cottage somewhere near this little creek called Tinker Creek. Over a period of time, she goes out and walks down by the river, comes home, and is astonished about it. It’s borderline theological. She’s wondering a lot about God and where we fit in with creation. There’s overlap between not religion exactly, but spirituality and science. And she writes very beautifully. She writes about the awe and the terror and the brutality of the universe, but also the incredible beauty and gentleness of it all. There’s a scene in there—I think it was a dragonfly eating its mate’s head or something. I can’t remember the details, but it viscerally stuck with me. She’s just calling on everyone to throw themselves down on their knees and be astonished. Yes. On the one hand, you might think astrophysicists are the least likely to be religious because they’ve looked down their telescopes and seen zero evidence of God. But, equally, if you’re looking down your telescope at billions of years and quadrillions of galaxies, then that probably does start to blow the mind somewhat. I can see how there’s a strong overlap between thinking, ‘Wow, this is vast’ and that sense of awe and wonder. The whole of Britain is divided up into Ordnance Survey maps , so I bought the local map of where I live. It covers 20 kilometers by 20 kilometers. (The US equivalent is the U.S. Geological Survey). Once a week I went out to a place I chose at random on the map. That randomness was really important to me, because otherwise I would just have gravitated to the sorts of places I always like going to. So I’d use an online random number generator to pick where on the map I had to go. Then I’d go there, usually on foot, but occasionally by bike, with my camera. Having a camera was also quite important to me, because that forced me to slow down and be observant. My challenge was quite a conceited one, which was to see everything in that square: every street, every footpath, every bit of woodland. That woodland/countryside aspect led me to an awareness of how little of our country is open to general access, which got me got me thinking about a book by Nick Hayes, The Trespasser’s Companion . But I think Beau Miles’s book is probably more suitable in terms of thinking a bit differently about adventure."

"This book taught me that careful attention to the living world could be celebrated and explored with rich, sensual language. After sipping for the first two decades of my life on watered-down wine, here was a glass overflowing with blood-red delight. Each taste revealed new layers. I truly got drunk on her writing. After reading this book, there was no going back for me. The idea of spending my professional life writing more scientific papers and grant proposals seemed impossible. I wanted to make wine of my own. In no way do I try to follow Dillard’s footsteps, still less mimic her. My interests and writing style are very different. But I do aspire to a kind of writing that honours the world and words equally. I fall far short of this aspiration, of course. Yes, she is very explicit in this book and in her later works that she seeks knowledge not just about the living world but about the divine. In particular, she asks what we are to make of pain and death, a burden so ubiquitous and heavy that it seems to mock any notion of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity. But she also senses that “beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them”. The tension between crushing darkness and exulting light animates most of her work. Dillard’s great talent is to remain within the tension, evoking it on the page without pushing toward a simplifying resolution. She is “wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them”. This feels very real to me. When I attend closely to a place or a soundscape, I often come away with a sense that the living world is both unfathomably broken and unutterably beautiful. Dillard’s writing explores and honours that paradox. No, it is not possible, and that is unfortunate because Thoreau is a problematic writer. So many others deserve to be put on the curricular and cultural pedestal ahead of him. But here in the United States we instead suffer from a great surfeit of Thoreau. Certainly, he paid close attention to some of the life around him and wrote sometimes beautifully about it. But he was also a misanthrope and his would-be asceticism is self-righteous and hypocritical. His writing hid his dependence on others, especially women in his family, and he espouses a notion of individuality than is fundamentally un-ecological. The lesson of the forest, as understood by both forest-dwelling peoples and forest-studying scientists, is that life is made of interdependent relationship. To believe that we earn our living “by the labor of my hands only” is a lie, one with especially pernicious effects in North America where politicians use such ideas of self-reliance as an excuse to turn away from communal responsibility and mutual aid. Kathryn Schultz’s essay about Thoreau in The New Yorker is a good place to start in understanding this not-so-wonderful side of him. “Almost all early natural history writers in the English tradition were white supremacist in some form or other” Both Beston and Dillard go out alone, as Thoreau claimed he did, and turn their gaze mostly away from the human lives around them. But they do so not to negate the importance of human relationship but to more deeply attend to the world beyond the human and, in part, to understand and love what is good in humans and nonhumans alike."

"One of the other things that, for me, goes very much with silence, although it’s not the same for everybody, is a deepening of the experience of nature and understanding of ecology. This book, which won the Pulitzer prize when it was released, is the most beautiful book about the wild. Dillard spent quite a long time in this small area in a particular valley called Tinker Creek in Virginia, America. She just recorded what she saw and what she thought about it, and this book is a collection of her observations. And it’s a very lovely book because it takes on the ferocity of nature and is very unsentimental, while at the same time being very beautiful. I think that she would say, and I would say, that being silent actually allows you to see the world more clearly. It’s often said that silent people have more acute hearing, and I think that they have a more acute sense of sight too. She just notices everything."

"Annie Dillard is clearly in dialogue with Thoreau. She writes a book from a similar stance, which she sketches in terms of a year. So: a year at Tinker Creek, January to December. And the annual cycle becomes a meditative reflection, what she calls a theodicy. What is our relation to God? What is the universe? and what is our place in it? These are exactly the kinds of questions that Thoreau asks, but she’s setting hers in the 20th century. Like Thoreau, she is fascinated by science and philosophy and religion, and reading omnivorously. And dwelling in a place where she can think, take walks, observe, read and think some more. So she’s enacting Thoreau, but in a 20th-century context: she takes on quantum physics, the latest research on DNA and the nature of life, the meaning of Darwinian evolution—well beyond Thoreau’s era, but extending Thoreau’s mantra “to live deliberately.” Even if she hadn’t mentioned his name you would think, Aha, this is enacting Thoreau’s project in a very contemporary way. But Dillard cites Thoreau frequently, and even when she doesn’t mention his name or allude to him, there are all sorts of wonderful cryptic references or lovely little conceptual puns on Walden . I hadn’t realized this until I re-read it recently, and it’s just a delight. She’s having such fun playing with his language and elaborating on his ways of seeing. It feels like a dance, this rich, playful, marvellous, metaphysical dance with Thoreau. I’ve never met Annie, but Bob [Richardson, her husband] has been a mentor. I’ve known him for many years. It wasn’t either of them who told me, but I have heard that when she got a copy of Bob’s biography of Thoreau, she said, ‘this is wonderful. I have to meet the man who wrote this.’ So his biography is what drew them together. It truly is. It’s interesting to me as a biographer to think about the similarities in the kinds of writing they each engage in: Bob Richardson wrote an intellectual biography, and Annie does, as I say, this kind of metaphysical dance where she enacts Thoreau in a completely fresh, free way. And while she doesn’t dwell on gender, the sense that it is a woman enacting this is everywhere, a delightfully wicked, subversive undertow. So, you have two forms of writing, two ways of extending Thoreau’s mode of thinking and acting in the world. Both rather different and yet coming together in this way. I’m very drawn to both. You know, I think it’s perfect that Thoreau’s most obvious inheritor is a woman. Partly because Thoreau himself—well, to know him and to know his writing is to know that he’s not stereotypically masculine. Indeed, he’s very puzzled by his own sense of gender. He knows he’s not like other men, and frets a bit over who he is, and how he is the way he is. Marilynne Robinson is another great inheritor. If I could have had ten books, I would add Robinson’s novel Housekeeping where, again, it’s a woman who takes the Thoreauvian stance, literally setting up housekeeping, like Thoreau, toward the problem of dwelling truly, which means departing from convention. “I think it’s perfect that Thoreau’s most obvious inheritor is a woman” I asked this question once many years ago, in a piece called ‘ Walden as Feminist Manifesto,’ which actually got some currency. In it, I said that women respond most deeply to what Thoreau has done because we recognize that he is liberating. He’s not asking us to keep house for him, he’s devising a whole other relationship to the household. And it’s a relationship that is, yes, a kind of feminist ideal. Some people thought I was nuts, but a lot of women have written me over the years and said that I put my finger on something. Years ago I read that many women feel a freedom in nature, freedom in walking alone in the wilderness, taking hikes, backpacking or whatever, because they walk out into the woods as Thoreau did and they’re not gendered. The traps and chains that hold them to certain social roles just drop away. I felt that when I was young. And so it doesn’t surprise me at all that women would step into Thoreau’s framework and say, ah, this gives me the freedom to be whatever it is that I choose to be."