A Good Start
January 13, 2020

     If I were going to start a religion, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek would be one of its foundational texts.  

     It was (is) the most important book I read in those special years between college and law school – and remains atop my list of favorite / most influential books.  I had to read the whole thing three times before I had a decent grasp of what Annie Dillard was doing with the book, mostly because its prose veers as close to poetry as prose can.  Reformat some of the paragraphs, and the bards of old could sing them.  It‛s that rich.  

     It is a clarion call to attention, to attendance, to tending to one‛s sight, to cultivating the tenderness to be awestruck by the Creation, in all its many forms.  

     It is also a demonstration.  Dillard invites the reader to join her for a year beside the creek, during which she aims to "somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what‛s going on here.  Then," she continues, "we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or if it comes to that, choir the proper praise."  She reels between the infinitely small and the cosmic, with the audacity of a child who has not yet learned the mental guard rails of adulthood.  Indeed, her project is to blast through the guard rails, throw off the blinders, and see what happens.

     And so it is also a travel log.  It is a record of what happens.  Like Thoreau before her, she takes a particular place as her point of departure and return, her anchor and doorway to the mystery, terror, beauty, and power of the universe.  

    For the last several years, usually in January, I have re-read Pilgirm at Tinker Creek in the way one reads a religious text – that is, for guidance and instruction, in search of some answer to the essential religious question: How shall we then live?  

     It is a good start.