About this title: The Pulitzer Prize-winning work by nature-writer Annie Dillard. Living alone on Tinker Creek in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, Dillard follows the progression of seasons and explores the cosmic significance of the beauty and violence coexisting in the natural world.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780060915452ISBN:0060915455
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. Second Harper Perennial printing. Pages clean, yellowing and unmarked. Binding tight without obvious spine creasing but with very slight twist. Cover shiny and attractive with little edge/shelf wear-downgraded solely due to page color, really in near fine condition. This is a nice sturdy copy, gently used. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780060915452ISBN:0060915455
Description: Fine. No dust jacket as issued. Very mild corner curling. No other flaws. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780060953027ISBN:0060953020
Description: Acceptable. A readable copy. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (the dust cover may be missing). Pages can include considerable notes-in pen or highlighter-but the notes cannot obscure the text. ******PLEASE NOTE****** Orders placed after Dec. 7 cannot be guaranteed delivery before Christmas unless you select EXPEDITED shipping! Thank you & Happy Holidays! read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books
Date Published: 1981
ISBN-13:9780553233896ISBN:0553233890
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. stamped armchair adventurer. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Harpercollins
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780060915452ISBN:0060915455
Description: A wonderful copy with some minor edgewear to the cover. Book has tanning or browning due to normal aging process. -, Trade PaperBack, Very Good / read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Harpercollins
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780060915452ISBN:0060915455
Description: A good reading copy only. Previous owners name inscribed inside front. May have underlining or highlighting throughout. Contains marginalia. -, Trade PaperBack, Good / read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Harpercollins
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780060915452ISBN:0060915455
Description: A good reading copy only. Previous owners name inscribed inside front. May have underlining or highlighting throughout. Contains marginalia. -, Trade PaperBack, Good / read more
"Sir James Jeans, British astronomer and physicist, suggested that the universe was beginning to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Humanists seized on the expression, but it was hardly news. We knew, looking around, that a thought branches and leafs, a tree comes to conclusion. But the question of who is thinking the thought is more fruitful than the question of who made the machine, for a machinist can of course wipe his hands and leave, and his simple machine still hums; but if the thinker's attention strays for a minute, his simplest thought ceases altogether. And, as I have stressed, the place where we so incontrovertibly find ourselves, whether thought or machine, is at least not in any way simple.
Instead, the landscape of the world is "ring-streaked, speckled, and spotted," like Jacob's cattle culled from Labin's herd ... (she tells the story) ... "Jacob set out for Canaan with his wives and twelve sons, the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel, and with these cattle that are Israel's heritage, into Egypt and out of Egypt, just as the intricate speckled and spotted world is ours.
Intricacy is that which is given from the beginning .... Anything can happen; any pattern of speckles may appear in a world ceaselessly bawling with newness. I see red blood stream in shimmering dots inside a goldfish's tail; I see the stout, extensible lip of a dragonfly nymph that can pierce and clasp a goldfish; and I see the clotted snarls of bright algae that snare and starve the nymph. I see engorged, motionless ants regurgitate pap to a colony of pawing workers, and I see sharks limned in light twist in a raised and emerald wave.
The wonder is--give the errant nature of freedom and the burgeoning of texture in time--the wonder is that all the forms are not monsters, that there is beauty at all, grace gratuitous, pennies found, like mockingbird's free fall. Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator's exuberance that grew such a tangle, and the grotesques and horrors bloom from that same free growth, that intricate scramble and twine up and down the conditions of time.
This, then, is the extravagant landscape of the world, given, given with pizzazz, given in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over."
"Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a wonderful book for anyone who loves nature. Dillard's relationship with the natural world is somewhat unique in my experience. Her fascination is equal parts love and revulsion, and she writes about both with scrutiny. Each chapter broaches some feature or response to nature that seems universal, like complexity, or perception, and Dillard brings a unique, largely (and refreshingly) unscientific perspective on them all.
There are tons of great passages in the book, but here's one in particular that hit home:
What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things as multiply and intricately as possible present and visible in my mind. Then I might be able to sit on the hill by the burnt books where the starlings fly over, and see not only the starlings, the grass field, the quarried rock, the viney woods, Hollins Pond, and the mountains beyond, but also, and simultaneously, feathers' barbs, springtails in the soil, crystal in the rock, chloroplasts streaming, rotifers pulsing, and the shape of the air in the pines. And, if I try to keep my eye on quantum physics, if I try to keep up with astronomy and cosmology, and really believe it all, I might ultimately be able to make out the landscape of the universe. Why not?
Update from 2009: I read this about a year ago, but I am constantly thinking about it, especially while reading. "You know, this is just like in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek...""
"I love this book. I like to reread it every couple of years. Here are some cool passages:
"The growth pressure of plants can do an impressive variety of tricks. Bamboo can grow three feet in twenty-four hours, an accomplishiment that is capitalized upon, legendarily, in that exquisite Asian torture in which a victim is strapped to a mesh bunk a mere foot above a bed of healthy bamboo plants whose woodlike tips have been sharpened. For the first eight hours he is fine, if jittery; then he starts turning into a colander, by degrees." (page 165)
"It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourisehd and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But 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. What you see is what you get." (page 17)"
"I love this book, but it frustrates me too. Maybe it's because Dillard was so young when she wrote it. But it doesn't deserve to be compared to Walden. Thoreau is arrogant and has a prescription for every one of society's problems. Dillard asks hard questions and agonizes over the answers. It's never an open and shut case for her. I'll read her books again and again, but I might be done with Thoreau."
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