i'm a very very complex person

I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.

This is Annie Dillard again, from a paragraph early in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, the book that is, it seems, the harvest of which she writes.

I began reading Pilgrim At Tinker Creek at the end of July, and I finished it in late September. That’s a long time to spend with one book, but I could not read this book in bits and idle moments; I had to read it in entire chapters and with full concentration. Even so, I feel that I will need to read this book again, that though I have grasped individual chapters, the wholeness of the book still eludes me.

I use words like wholeness and concentration because they seem intrinsic to Dillard’s project in this book. She chronicles a year of living, walking, and observing in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, but the book is more than just a record of events. It is also an attempt to come to a spiritual understanding of the natural world, and an exploration of the role of humanity in the world. Dillard wrestles with grandeur, intricacy, fecundity, violence, beauty, and what it is to experience the sublime. She is a very sharp observer—her descriptive writing, while sometimes a bit heavy-handed (she admits in an afterword that while writing this book she thought that a sentence “was not quite done until it was overdone.”) is clever, surprising, and very often beautiful—and she sieves her observations through the staggering amount of natural history and theological thought that she has read.

There were a lot of passages in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek that fascinated me and resonated with me. I was intensely envious of Dillard’s deep local knowledge. She knows her valley and her creek in all seasons and all weathers, in its trees and creatures, in the shape of its geography. That is the kind of knowledge of a place that I want to cultivate. Dillard’s writing about seeing, too, seemed to mesh so perfectly with my own experience that it was like she was putting words to thoughts I hadn’t quite had yet: the slow learning that happens when you decide to try to see the natural world, the strangely half-active, half-passive nature of that process… Well, read Dillard; she describes it much better than I do.

But all through the book there was also the matter of my atheism and Dillard’s Christianity. Dillard’s faith is active and seeking, not at all the kind of religious belief that can be so alienating to me, but I still can’t share it. Nevertheless, I don’t feel the kind of unbridgeable gap between myself and Dillard that I sometimes feel with religious people. Perhaps this is the thing that makes me feel like I need to read this book again someday. I get to thinking or writing about the spiritual elements of the book, and I suddenly lose my ability to articulate; maybe if I read it again this won’t happen on my next pass.

I will end with one more quotation, one in which Dillard herself sums up the book far more gracefully than I have done:

There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright.