...if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your
    day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime
    of days.  It is that simple.
           -Annie Dillard

This Pulitzer Prize-winning book, describing Dillard's observations during one year at Tinker Creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, is consciously modeled on Thoureau's Walden, which was the subject of her Masters thesis.   The essays collected here first appeared in everything from Harper's and The Atlantic to The Christian Science Monitor and Sports Illustrated.  This variety of publications suggests something of the variety of ideas and topics that Dillard addresses, but only suggests.  Dillard is something of a polymath, has described herself as spiritually promiscuous and reads voraciously.  As a result, the events that she sees trigger wide ranging dissertations on a myriad of topics from Sufism to the Eskimos.

However, there is one unifying theme, Dillard's attempt to understand God and why life for some requires violent death for others.  She was recovering from a severe bout of pneumonia at the time she wrote the book, and a sense of mortality suffuses every page.  Ultimately, she seems to have determined that the beauty to be found in Nature is ample compensation for the pain and suffering that accompany it, if only we open ourselves to that beauty.

The book is framed by an admonition:

    The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped.  His wings were still folded against his
    sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second,
    through empty air.  Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his
    wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant,
    white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass.  I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant
    step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight.  The fact of his free fall was like the old
    philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest.  The answer must be, I think, that
    beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them.  The least we can do is try
    to be there.

and the following conclusion:

    I think that the dying pray at the last not 'please', but 'thank you', as a guest thanks his host at the
    door.  Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the
    cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.  Divinity is not playful.  The universe was not made
    in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.  By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy,
    and fleet.  There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.  And then you walk fearlessly,
    eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely
    how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his
    vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him,
    but with which he will not part.

By the end of this thoughtful, beautiful book, you are bound to agree with her conclusion.

(Reviewed:01-Dec-98)

Grade: (A) Orrin C. Judd

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Annie Dillard Links:

    -WIKIPEDIA: Annie Dillard
    -AUTHOR SITE: AnnieDillard.com     -Annie Dillard WWW site
    -FEATURED AUTHOR: NY Times Book Review
    -INDEX: Annie Dilliard (MuckRack)
    -INDEX: Annie Dilliard (Electric Typewriter)
    -INDEX: Annie Dilliard (The Atlantic)
    -INDEX: Annie Dillard (American Heritage)
    -INDEX: Annie Dilliard (LitHub)
    -INDEX: Annie Dillard (1945–2026): From our archives: the writer documents the fan mail she received from readers (The Yale Review, Sep 16, 2026)
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    -OBIT: Annie Dillard, Meditative Author of ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,’ Dies at 81: Her Thoreau-like account of journeys in the woods, published when she was 28, was the first of many ruminations on life and nature, good and evil. (Daniel Lewis, Sept. 16, 2026, NY Times)
    -OBIT: Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, dies at 81 (Etelka Lehoczky, 9/16/26, NPR: All Things Considered)
    -OBIT: Annie Dillard, Pulitzer prize-winning author of nonfiction and nature essays, dies aged 81: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, published when Dillard was 28, skyrocketed her to become one of the most prominent nonfiction writers of her generation (Marina Dunbar, 16 Sep 2026, The Guardian)
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    -TRIBUTE: Annie Dillard brought poetry into prose, pioneering a mystical form of creative nonfiction that critics both admired and misunderstood (Amy Cannon, September 18, 2026, The Conversation)
    -TRIBUTE: Annie Dillard’s unrestrained hallelujah: The visionary writer showed us that paying attention could make us certain that the world is holy. (Amy Frykholm, 9/18/26, Christian Century)
    -ESSAY: The moment that sealed my love for Annie Dillard (1945–2026) (Christian Century)
    -TRIBUTE: What Nature’s Silence Said to Annie Dillard: The late writer believed that hearing the natural world is its own form of prayer. (Isabel Fattal, 9/17/26, The Atlantic)
    -TRIBUTE: Remembering the great Annie Dillard. (James Folta, September 16, 2026, LitHub)
    -TRIBUTE: One of Our Greatest Writers Has Died. But Not for Me.: Annie Dillard died this week. But her voice — wild and holy and hilarious — continues to live in my head, my soul, and somehow, my dog. (Sam Anderson, Sept. 20, 2026, NY Times Magazine)
    -TRIBUTE: The Time I Played Catch with Annie Dillard: A Young Writer's Literary Spring Training Pilgrimage (Michael Croley, March 10, 2016, LitHub)
    -TRIBUTE: The American Writer Who Refused To Play By Today’s Rules: Annie Dillard was a woman who stalked her calling, weasel-like and unabashed. (Ann Bauer, Sep 17, 2026, Daily Wire)
    -TRIBUTE: I mourned Annie Dillard as if I knew her personally: Writers are mirror makers. They use words to create a sheen onto which we see all manner of reflections. (Danielle Tumminio Hansen, 9/25/26, Christian Century)
    -TRIBUTE: Stalk the Gaps Annie Dillard’s ecstatic vision (M. I. Devine, September 24, 2026, Commonweal)
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    -ESSAY: Making Contact Encounters with readers (Annie Dillard, 7/01/1998, Yale Review)
    -ESSAY: For the Time Being (Annie Dillard, Winter 1998, Paris Review)
    -ESSAYS: Annie Dillard’s Impossible Pages: Three early and unpublished works by the author of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” (Introduction by Sam Anderson, March 2, 2016, NY Times Magazine)
    -ESSAY: Do I consider myself a Christian?: I know one thing: there is holiness. (Annie Dilliard, 6/30/20, Christian Century)
    -ESSAY: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Wherever there is stillness there is the still small voice, nature’s old song and dance … A meditation on silence and other matters. (Annie Dillard, February 1981, The Atlantic)
    -ESSAY: The Force That Drives the Flower (Annie Dillard, November 1973, The Atlantic)
    -ESSAY: Write Till You Drop (ANNIE DILLARD, 5/28/89, NY Times Book Review)
    -ESSAY: Annie Dillard on How Writers Learn to Trust Instinct: “Original writing fashions a form.” (Annie Dillard, January 14, 2022, Lit Hub)
    -ESSAY: Total Eclipse: “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.” (Annie Dillard, August 8, 2017, The Atlantic)
    -EXCERPT: from 'The Maytrees: A Novel' (Annie Dillard, 6/04/2007, NPR)
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    -PROFILE: The Thoreau of the Suburbs: When Annie Dillard wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she didn’t think anyone would want to read a memoir by a "Virginia housewife." So she left her domestic life out of the book—and turned her surroundings into a wilderness. (Diana Saverin, February 5, 2015, The Atlantic)
    -INTERVIEW: Author Interview: Annie Dillard, Author of 'The Abundance' (Melissa Block, March 12, 2016, Weekend Edition Saturday)
    -INTERVIEW: Annie Dillard Discusses her First Novel (Fresh Air, April 20, 1992)
    -INTERVIEW: Annie Dillard's Tale of Bohemian Love by the Sea (Scott Simon, July 28, 2007, Weekend Edition Saturday
    -PROFILE: Annie Dillard and the Writing Life (Alexander Chee, 16 Oct 2009, Morning News)
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    -ESSAY: Contemplating the Infinite with Annie Dillard: "One of the most sensitive, listening intelligences ever to breathe American air" (John Freeman, March 10, 2016, LitHub)
    -ESSAY: Yes, She Reads Everything: Pico Iyer on Annie Dillard: A Writer Furiously Alive and Impossible to Anticipate (Pico Iyer, March 10, 2016, LitHub)
    -PODCAST: Jen Hadfield on Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: In Conversation for the Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast (Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast, July 24, 2024, LitHub)
    -ESSAY: Annie Dillard's Mesmerizing Observations of Nature and Self at the Most Conscious Level: "Beauty and grace are performed whether we see them or not, least we can do is be there." (Ellen Vrana, The Examined Life)
    -ESSAY: The Time I Played Catch with Annie Dillard: A Young Writer's Literary Spring Training Pilgrimage (Michael Croley, March 10, 2016, LitHub)
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    -ESSAY: A Pilgrim's Progress (Mary Cantwell, NY Times Book Review)
    -The Mysticism of Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" (Sandra Stahlman, 5/94)
    -Noticer: The Visionary Art of Annie Dillard
    -Unlicensed Metaphysics:  Annie Dillard Revisited
    -David A. Sheftman, M. A. EWRT 1-A (bio & study questions from a professor's course)
    -REVIEW: Meditation on Seeing: a review of pilgrim at Tinker's Creek (EUDORA WELTY, March 24, 1974, NY Times Book Review)
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    -REVIEW: of FOR THE TIME BEING, by Annie Dillard Apparent contradictions: By keeping her private life under wraps, personal essayist Annie Dillard has created a writing life of uncommon integrity (Michael Joseph Gross, Boston Phoenix)
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