Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
by Annie Dillard

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Book Reviews of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Book Review: One of the greatest American nature classics
Summary: 5 Stars

I have to confess that in my own reading, I lean heavily towards dead people. It is not that I do not want to support living writers; I just am not always certain which writers are fads. The great virtue of dead authors is that they have withstood the test of time. I have made an exception over the years of Annie Dillard. She has a wonderful eye, a vivid imagination, a wonderful prose style, and can tease insight out of the most unlikely of sources. Although she has authored many wonderful books--TEACHING A STONE TO TALK, THE WRITING LIFE, LIVING BY FICTION, AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD--this early book remains in many ways my favorite. In it Dillard looks intently at nature, and wherever she looks she finds God.

The book on one level is a modern reiteration of the existence of God, the resurrection of the cosmological argument for his existence. I admit its power. Of the traditional arguments for the existence of god, I have never felt the power of the more celebrated ontological and teleological arguments. The latter I never felt especially compelling, while the former always seems to be a mental trick, hard for a newcomer to philosophy to refute, but an argument one instinctively feels to be bogus. But I admit that I have felt the power of moral arguments for God's existence (a two edged sword, since one can easily concoct argument's for God's nonexistence based on pain and suffering, as Ivan does so memorably in the "Rebellion" chapter in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV). But even atheistic thinkers have confessed the power of the cosmological argument, though it isn't an argument so much as a sensation created in us as we contemplate nature. Atheistic David Hume confessed it difficult not to imagine a Creator when observing the heavens, and the somewhat more religious Immanuel Kant proclaimed that two things filled his heart with wonder: the moral law within and the starry heavens above (and in both places he found a necessity for a deistical god).

Dillard, as she gazes about her in the Shenandoah Valley, finds many wondrous things to contemplate. She writes beautifully about all she looks at, and if she is sometimes mildly guilty of the anthropomorphizing that Edward Abbey railed so passionately against (a mountain doesn't "feel" anything, he argued; a mountain simpley "is"), she also writes about everything she looks at with a nontrivial prose that never takes anything for granted, and which is intent on giving every entity its due. Ultimately, she writes about God.

Although the book as a whole is remarkable, the highpoint for me are two extraordinary chapters, chapters that express the cosmological sentiment better than anything else I have ever read. The first of these is "Intricacy," in which she delves into the amazing complexity and diversity of the designs of nature. Her discovery is that nature doesn't tend towards simplicity, but to its opposite. As she gazes about, she concludes "Look, in short, at practically anything--the coot's feet, the mantis's face, a banana, the human ear--and see that not only did the creator create everything, but that he is apt to create ANYTHING. He'll stop at nothing." The other chapter I want to mention is "Fecundity," which ends up as a sort of Sheer Quantity Argument for the Existence of God. We think of evolution (a theory she wishes to embellish rather than deny) as being economical, tending towards simplicity. But Dillard is astonished at the sheer fecundity of nature, that "In a single cubic inch of soil, the length of the root hairs [of the rye plant] totaled 6000 miles." She is also cognizant of the maximal implications of cosmological arguments for believing in god: they point to a creator, but not to what kind of creator. As she puts it, "We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet." I delight in many of her conclusions as she regards nature. "Although it is true that we are moral creatures in an amoral world, the world's amorality does not make it a monster." Or, "Nature love the idea of an individual, if not the individual himself." The book is stuffed to overflowing with reflections like this.

Summary of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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