⋙ PDF Free Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Harper Perennial Modern Classics Annie Dillard 9780061233326 Books

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Harper Perennial Modern Classics Annie Dillard 9780061233326 Books

Download As PDF : Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Harper Perennial Modern Classics Annie Dillard 9780061233326 Books

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Harper Perennial Modern Classics Annie Dillard 9780061233326 Books

How can you not like a nonfiction book that’s both informational and interesting? Entertaining too. Seriously, if I’d had exposure to texts that made science even remotely as engaging and intriguing as this one, I might have been become an ornithologist or entomologist. Who knew that the average size of all living animals, including humans, is almost that of a horsefly or that the average temperature of Earth is 57 degrees Fahrenheit? Not I, at least not until reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Dillard’s musings on life, both ours as humans and that of the planet’s inhabitants from muskrats to mites), trees, rocks, creeks, clouds, and mountains, give the reader a fascinating perspective on nature and on life itself. I’ll never walk out in the front yard again without thinking of the moles burrowing beneath the soil or the starlings let loose in Central Park in 1890. I’ll never stand beside a creek without remembering its rushing, fleeting nature being a metaphor for life. One thing I will remember is the admonition to “Catch it if you can….These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.”

This book was first recommended to me by some writer friends after I mentioned that I was reading (at that time) For the Time Being. “You have to read Pilgrim,” they all practically shouted at me. Now I know why. The prose, the information, the visual pictures of Tinker Mountain and its surroundings, the vocabulary (chitin, oriflamme, and bastinado for starters), and the references to spiritual and scientific sources make this book a must-read.


Tags : Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) [Annie Dillard] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <strong>Winner of the Pulitzer Prize</strong> <em>Pilgrim at Tinker Creek</em> is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley. Annie Dillard sets out to see what she can see. What she sees are astonishing incidents of beauty tangled in a rapture with violence. Her personal narrative highlights one year's exploration on foot in the Virginia region through which Tinker Creek runs. In the summer,Annie Dillard,Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perennial Modern Classics),Harper Perennial Modern Classics,0061233323,9780061233326,Essays,General,Theology,Blue Ridge (Va.),Nature,Nature.,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY General,DILLARD, ANNIE - PROSE & CRITICISM,General Adult,LITERARY COLLECTIONS Essays,NATURE Essays,Natural history,NatureEcology,Non-Fiction,REFERENCE General,RELIGION Spirituality,RELIGION Theology,United States,NAT000000,NAT024000

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Harper Perennial Modern Classics Annie Dillard 9780061233326 Books Reviews

Five stars may be too many for this early volume in the Annie Dillard canon. It makes demands on the reader that are similar to those faced by a teacher reading a gifted student's term paper The book is dazzling but it's also disorienting, like a travel adventure without a map. Still, it's a book that changes how the reader sees the world, and for that it gets highest marks.

This is a fairly easy book to read but a tough one to get through. It is simultaneously nature study, personal diary, Scripture commentary, mystical theology, field observation manual, and blank-verse poem. Annie Dillard was just age 27 when she wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and it is very much a young writer’s book, poetic and enthusiastic. Such strengths are also weaknesses at times the poetry can be a bit ornate, and the multitude of facts can be daunting. Still, there are significant rewards in this book, if the reader, like a seasoned traveler, is willing to follow the author wherever she goes.

How far will we be going? The word “pilgrim” in the title suggests a long-distance trek to a holy place. But when we start the first chapter, we find Dillard already at a creekside cabin in Virginia , where she will stay for a year. If we’re to join her as pilgrims, we seem to at the destination without even setting out. Notice, though, that she calls her cabin an anchorite’s hermitage. Studying and writing by night, silently watching by day, she is more hermit than pilgrim. For Dillard and her readers, the journey in this book won’t be measured in miles. The road we’re on goes inward.

How strenuous is this going to be? Dillard answers this one with a story from Genesis, the one where Jacob wrestles with God on the bank of a stream. The contest goes on all night. Like Jacob, Dillard waits by a stream, and for one strenuous page after another, she wrestles with creation and its workings. We watch horrified as an outsized water bug liquefies a frog, as mother insects devour their freshly-laid eggs, as reindeer are driven mad by clouds of flies. This will not be an easy trip.

What will we see along the way? Before we can answer that, we have to confront a key fact about Creation It may seem like an extravagant, intricate machine, set in motion and then left to run on its own; but it really resembles, once everything is examined carefully, a thought, a series of ideas made real. There is Mind behind what we see. Much of the book explores all the amazing stuff that there is in the world. Say what you will, the Creator loves variety and loves “Pizzaz.”

But what’s the reward for finishing the journey? Death is what awaits us, of course; Life seems to require it, making room for what’s next. So, what will we do when we get there, with all we’ve seen along the way of pizzaz but also of blood and destruction? Here’s Dillard in the final chapter “I think that the dying pray at the last not ‘please,’ but ‘thank you,’ as a guest thanks his host at the door.”
It's intriguing reading peoples' reviews of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. The majority find it spellbindingly beautiful, a work of poetry, and well deserving of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize it was awarded. A small, vocal group insist it's mind-numbingly dull, with no plot and no resolution. It doesn't "go anywhere". In many ways I find that the story, and readers' reactions, are quite similar to how meditation is perceived.

First, the basics. Annie Dillard married a poet, earned a Master's Degree in English, and wrote her thesis on Thoreau and Walden Pond. For two years after she graduated she was writing, journaling, and painting. She then decided that in essence she should write her own take on nature, similar to Thoreau's experiences. Where Thoreau was a man out in rural Massachusetts in the mid-1800s, Dillard was a woman, over a hundred years later, in rural Roanoke, Virginia. She felt there was room enough in the world for a fresh take on natural life.

And indeed she was quite correct.

This isn't a "story" about a person starting Here and ending up There. It isn't even a series of essays, as some readers have mistakenly assumed. Instead, Dillard is clear that this is a cohesive piece, organized chronologically, building and expanding on previous experiences and then moving forward. Dillard is not only keen in her insight into what is before her, but also amazingly well read. She can find the relations between the water before her and the Eskimo traditions, between a barely visible creature and the quotes of scientists from decades ago. It's like sitting down at the side of a pond with your beloved aunt who has traveled the world, and hearing fascinating stories about how various bits of life relate to fascinating creatures far away.

The book is poetry, and one focus here is that *life* is poetry. Everything around us is beautiful and terrible and will be gone in the blink of an eye. Turn your head too quickly and it will skitter off, never to be seen again. The roiling crimson beauty of a magnificent sunset will fade into a smoky grey, and no matter how many sunsets you watch after that, none will ever be quite the same.

Is it "boring" to read about the fantastic myriad wonders that nature presents to us every day? That's an intriguing question. Somehow our world has trained us to be obsessively attentive when a movie-screen freight train barrels towards a stalled car, but to turn away uninterested when a double rainbow shimmers into existence over a lake. We stare down at our smartphone screen in dedicated frenzy when a Facebook post blings into existence, but we ignore the real live human being before us who we could learn so much from. We want a start, a middle, and an end. But nature goes on, always renewing, constantly restoring, and I think somewhere many of us have lost track of that.

So, yes, settling in with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is like settling into a favorite chair on your back porch, sipping a delicious glass of wine, and watching with fascination as the golden-winged dragonflies perform an intricate mating ritual. It is spellbinding, and soothing, and fascinating - but one has to want to slow down and pay attention. One needs to mute the TV, turn off the cell, and be willing to breathe in the natural world which is all around us.

Well recommended.
How can you not like a nonfiction book that’s both informational and interesting? Entertaining too. Seriously, if I’d had exposure to texts that made science even remotely as engaging and intriguing as this one, I might have been become an ornithologist or entomologist. Who knew that the average size of all living animals, including humans, is almost that of a horsefly or that the average temperature of Earth is 57 degrees Fahrenheit? Not I, at least not until reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Dillard’s musings on life, both ours as humans and that of the planet’s inhabitants from muskrats to mites), trees, rocks, creeks, clouds, and mountains, give the reader a fascinating perspective on nature and on life itself. I’ll never walk out in the front yard again without thinking of the moles burrowing beneath the soil or the starlings let loose in Central Park in 1890. I’ll never stand beside a creek without remembering its rushing, fleeting nature being a metaphor for life. One thing I will remember is the admonition to “Catch it if you can….These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.”

This book was first recommended to me by some writer friends after I mentioned that I was reading (at that time) For the Time Being. “You have to read Pilgrim,” they all practically shouted at me. Now I know why. The prose, the information, the visual pictures of Tinker Mountain and its surroundings, the vocabulary (chitin, oriflamme, and bastinado for starters), and the references to spiritual and scientific sources make this book a must-read.