Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"I'm getting used to this planet and to this curious human culture which is as cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully cruel."

"It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale."

Annie Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a beautiful collection of observations that Annie Dillard makes about her home near Tinker Creek in Virginia over the course of the year. Starting at the end of winter, she describes her experiences of the place and how her observations shaped her world view, and how her world view shaped her observations and interactions with the other inhabitants at Tinker Creek.

I really liked this book. The way Dillard describes everything is fantastic. She has an incredibly unique way of describing her world. She asks questions and challenges the assumptions she has routinely, trying to reconcile the beauty and order that she finds in nature, with the harshness and seeming randomness that she also finds. She often describes this struggle using scientific knowledge that she has gained from books, and frames it against a backdrop of religious text. I really liked the scientific inquiry that she brought in, though her arguments and religious references sometimes seemed forced.

Her prose is phenomenal, the way she phrases things is beautifully blunt, whether talking about where she finds home or how unique having an interior skeleton is among most of the animal kingdom.

"The general rile in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without. We vertebrates are living dangerously, and we vertebrates are positively piteous, like so many peeled trees."

She does a fantastic job making her statements about the way the world is intensely personal, which is a feat when so many pit us against nature: we are separated by clothes we've made and shelters we've built. She breaks down this barrier and makes the connections clear, all the while not discounting the differences between all living things.

This was a great read. I highly recommend it.