September 11, 2008
My Three by Annie D.: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, and For the Time Being by Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard made me buy a book about bugs, an expensive, out-of-print book about bugs, Edwin Way Teale’s The Strange Lives of Familiar Insects. Perhaps focusing on Teale is an odd way to pay homage to Dillard, but if you spend any time with Dillard in the woods, on the water, or even aloft, you’ll know she loves insects, and you’ll know how persuasive she can be, too.
This past spring I decided I’d make my summer reading project an immersion into one author. I wanted to know one author intimately, to take my time hearing one voice. I selected Annie Dillard because I’d loved a few of her books, because she had taught me things, opened me up, made me weep, invited me to question myself, and did it all with some of the most breathtaking prose I’d ever remembered. So, Annie it was.
I read eight Dillard books.
My reading project began with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This was my first time reading Pilgrim, which was just released with a new afterword (2007) in which Dillard says, “I was twenty-seven in 1972 when I began writing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It is a young writer’s book in its excited eloquence and its metaphysical boldness. (Fools rush in.) Using the first person, I tried to be—in Emerson’s ever-ludicrous phrase—a transparent eyeball.” Indeed, and the effort earned her a Pulitzer.
The book is sweeping, clanging, educational, intense, amusing, difficult, pompous, exhilarating, over the top. It’s not just about bugs; it’s about beauty, turtles, faith, flowers, waiting, rocks, wind, storms, children, loneliness, hatching praying mantises, change, arbitrary destruction, death, coots, loss, God, the gods, clouds, the cosmos, your soul. And everything else you can imagine.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is about settling for a year in the woods near a nice creek in the same way that Walden is about growing beans and living in a homemade shack. No doubt either book may motivate you to read about bugs or grow beans, but the real driver is Dillard's question: is God a nice guy or out to get us? Excuse my liberal paraphrasing, but if you spend several months reading Dillard you learn to pare it down, as she has over the years, and snap up the meat. Dillard worries this question to some degree in all of her books, but here it has a neat, dichotomous structure: in the first half she exalts the beauty of creation; in the second half, she blasts you with it ugliness. In a final few chapters she reconciles the opposites, making them a song of thanksgiving, for one cannot have the beautiful without the ugly.
This theme is revisited in For the Time Being, written in 1999. In juxtaposed vignettes about clouds, the natural history of sand, the life of Teilhard de Chardin, the business of Talmudic priests, salt, and the varieties of birth defects documented in medical texts, the now over-50 Dillard tears away at the questions again: how is it we exist; why are we here; why, why, why? It’s a theological, philosophical, surprisingly fresh, and occasionally tongue-in-cheek narrative that asks the very difficult questions we mostly hide from. We are not armchair theologians, after all, but Dillard asks us to be, just for the time being.
In For the Time Being she desires less to resolve the irresolvable discrepancies, urging us to have faith but be realistic. “Do you suffer what a French paleontologist called ‘the distress that makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and stars’? For the world is as glorious as ever, and exalting, but for credibility’s sake let’s start with the bad news.” And, so, a description of the bird-headed dwarf baby is followed by the wisdom of the Buddha, who says, “it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.” We live with eyes open to the terror, but we still see the beauty because “we still leave footprints in a trail whose end we do not know.” This is a challenging book, but deeply rewarding.
And, after you have taken this penetrating voyage, you might enjoy something so very pleasant and free of big questions, An American Childhood, that you may not believe it came from the same inkwell. Written in 1987, this memoir of her childhood in Pittsburgh is uniquely free of the conundrums that are the hallmark of all Dillard’s essays and nonfiction. (Although she does have some trouble around dating in high school, I should warn you.)
Dillard’s description of Pittsburgh is charming, light, and thorough. The neighborhoods come alive. Here I spent happy hours with Annie, sketching in the attic, working diligently at the microscope, and singing and whistling with joyful abandon. The reminiscences of her family’s love of wit and verbal twists are delightful. Her experiences of selecting Modern Library editions at the Homewood Library and forming her first critical opinions of literature are a hoot: “I couldn’t count on Modern Library the way I could count on, say Mad magazine, which never failed to slay me. Native Son was good, Walden was pretty good. The Interpretation of Dreams was okay, and The Education of Henry Adams was awful. Ulysses, a very famous book, was also awful. Confessions by Augustine, whose title promised so much, was a bust. Confessions by Jean-Jacque Rousseau was much better, though it fell apart halfway through.”
I’d recommend An American Childhood for anyone, of any age, at any time. It’s a great book for girls who are interested in science. Just be aware that anything else you read by Dillard will not have the same carefree charm. But it will have the same incredible Dillard prose. —MV
