Annie Dillard"s "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" can be read like a journal filled with Dillard's observation in Tinker Creek. She uses figurative language like imagery, personification, and allusions to let the readers in on her surroundings. Besides describing them she talks about her observations using scientific ideas. Dillard uses imagery very well, "The whole show had been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes.. flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames," (Dillard 11) As I continued to read I was amazed at her ideas and observations. Some were disturbing and some were wonderful. Her work is similar to Thoreau's with differences as well. Dillard's writing seems to be more about the natural environment rather than spiritual growth. Three chapters that stood out to me are "Seeing".
In seeing, Dillard thinks about seeing or in other words perspective. She turns to this childhood memory where she would encounter pennies, "When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find... I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions … I was greatly excited … at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe." (14-15). When you're a kid, before you realize how much a penny is worth, it's a big deal to have or find one. But when you get older and realize it won't buy you anything at all, you might not even attempt to pick it up. In going to Tinker Creek, Dillard is determined to see the world through a child's eyes again; to experience the same concept of treasure a penny holds for a six-year-old. In this chapter, she looks at the book The Mountains by Steward Edwards and she doesn't like his ideology that to see you have to "forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificial obvious". As the chapter unfolds she realizes that the more she sees, the more she can't see in a sense. She relates this to something Marius Von Senden talks about, that when blind people are given sight they have no sense of space or context: shadows to them look like "dark marks".
In the chapter, "The present", Dillard says, when we realize we're gonna die, "we take leave of our senses" (91), children, like in "Seeing", "the only thing they have got is sense". I decide to live our lives like children (open-minded), full of questions, ideas, and creativity, then we will see the world in a broader way. She talks about consciousness and self-consciousness, she believes that consciousness helps us live in the present by giving us data comparison and self-consciousness hinders the ability to recognize the glory of the present.
In the chapter, Intricacy, Dillard contemplates the circulatory system of her goldfish Ellery Channing. She talks about the nervous system "I saw red blood cells whip, one by one, through the capillaries in the goldfish's tail" (125), "I see red blood steam in shimmering dots inside a goldfish's tail" (147). This adds to the idea that she's not a scientist but she is willing to learn from analyzing the environment.
There are a few passages that show Dillard's spirituality with nature, like Thoreau. She talks about the souls of animals and proposes that nature is rare in beauty and if you stare at it long you will see the rareness, "Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves into the water before heaven..." (Dillard 18). For further reading, I would like to make a connection to writing in "American Earth". Aldo Leopard and her would get along. They both wrote of their surroundings using literary devices and used scientific ideology to strengthen their arguments and writing. But she also contrasts him because Dillard tells us she's not a scientist and Leopard is knowledgeable in science.
I really enjoyed Dillard's writing. She was able to capture the beauty and expanse around her very beautiful, not forgetting to include her ideology while describing her surroundings.
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