Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 197452ya, is the literary equivalent of John Coltrane writing and performing Giant Steps.
It is carefully crafted form filled in with patient observation and reverent passion. It is executed with such technical skill it leaves one breathless.
The book is a beautiful expression of what it means to encounter the divine.
“I have glutted on richness and welcome hyssop. This distant silver November sky, these sere branches of trees, shed and bearing their pure and secret colors—this is the real world, not the world gilded and pearled. I stand under wiped skies directly, naked, without intercessors. Frost winds have lofted my body’s bones with all their restless sprints to an airborne raven’s glide. I am buoyed by a calm and effortless longing, an angled pitch of the will, like the set of the wings of the monarch which climbed a hill by falling still.”
If you are in need of an antidote, and I won’t even bother saying what for, give yourself the gift of reading this book.
Aside: Is there a better framing of the kind of culture we live in than this excerpt from the afterword?...
“Later a reporter interviewed me over the phone. “You write so much about Eskimos in this book,” she said. “How come there are so many Eskimos?” I said that the spare arctic landscape suggested the soul’s emptying itself in readiness for the incursions of the divine. There was a pause. At last she said, “I don’t think my editor will go for that.”