Dear readers,
It is the 10th Week of our summer book club! We are past the halfway point in our book, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Thank you to all of you who’ve committed both to read and to participate in our summer outdoor challenge. I hope you’ve enjoyed the time and reflections this space has offered.
Because of the length of this book, we’ll keep reading into September. We should finish in the 3rd or 4th week of the month, at which I’ll turn on paid subscriptions and return to our regular monthly content. If you’re interested in further book clubs, and have thoughts on books you’d like to discuss, don’t hesitate to reach out via email.
This week, we are reading Chapter 10: “Fecundity” in Tinker Creek. It is a crucial chapter in the book—one that presses into the questions of suffering, death, and ugliness that are so important to this narrative. I think I have said this before, but perhaps it is worth restating: Dillard differs from a lot of other nature writers. She does not paint Nature as a benign, harmonious, and always-lovely space. She spends quite a lot of time focusing on the grotesque, the unexpected, and the ruthless. This can make her work unpleasant to read. Because she does this, however, she shows us the world as it is, and forces us to reckon with the discrepancies between our ideals and our environment.
A side note: this chapter helps reveal Dillard’s brilliance as a writer. Like a poet, she chooses her words wisely—not just for meaning, but for sound, texture, and emotion. Chapter 8, on “intricacy,” is full of words that delight the mind and tongue: “spendthrift,” “gratuitous,” “fluted fringe,” “intricacy,” “speckled,” “snarled,” “delicate,” “peripheral extravagance,” “silken,” “sunlighted,” etc. But Chapter 10, on “fecundity,” is full of words that make your skin crawl: “fleshy,” “viscid,” “oozing,” “turgid,” “mewling,” “lumpy,” “encrusting,” “swelling,” and so on. Just the sound of these chapters appeal or repel subconsciously.
And so we turn to Chapter 10’s deep focus on the unpleasant and the uncomfortable. Chapter 10 is about life, abundant life, as expressed in the idea of “fecundity.” But it’s also about two important facts: one, the fact that the overwhelming abundance of life on this planet can be repellent or disagreeable to humans (consider the insect). And two, the fact that this sheer enormity of life is only possible or necessary because of its abundance of death.
“The driving force behind all this fecundity is a terrible pressure I also must consider, the pressure of birth and growth, the pressure that splits the bark of trees and shoots out seeds, that squeezes out the egg and bursts the pupa, that hungers and lusts and drives the creature relentlessly towards its own death.”
Dillard’s eighth chapter on abundance and intricacy (which I considered here) is, she now suggests, “inaccurate and lopsided. It is too optimistic.” While the infinite variety and abundance of the world result in bountiful glory, focusing solely on that glory can easily “leave something vital out of the picture.” It’s like we are staring at the trees while avoiding their shadows. It is not hard to rejoice in the stunning growth and spread of tree roots. But, Chapter 10 asks us, what about cockroaches and rats? The growth of some species appears happy and lovely to humans. The growth of others makes us squeamish, makes us shudder. It’s a hard accusation to refute.
Perhaps the reason the fecundity of creatures can strike us in this way is because their proliferation is so often caught up in death and loss. Spiderling survival rates are 70 percent at best — 50 percent or less, if their mother doesn’t live long enough. Only one in 50 frog eggs laid will survive to adulthood. When and if the cockroach and rat survive, we picture them hiding in corners and feeding in dirty alleys. They become emblematic of the loss and decay of the world. Ticks survive to feed on the life of others, transferring disease from creature to creature. The “waste of life,” Dillard suggests, is what makes us squeamish. What’s it all about? “Why not make fewer barnacle larvae and give them a decent chance? Are we dealing in life, or in death?”
This chapter is a crucial one in Dillard’s journey through theodicy, the “why” questions that so capture the human mind. Here, near the end of her chapter, Dillard prompts us to confront death’s presence in the world, and not to turn away from it. If we live in a world that “wastes life,” we have to consider that waste—and the rush of emotions, of anger and pain, that we feel in response. Are we “moral creatures in an amoral world?” Is “this world, my mother, a monster”?
Or is the real monster the emotion, the caring, that drives us to question and mourn and curse in the face of suffering and death? Could we train ourselves not to care so much, and live more peacefully as a result?
I don’t want to give away Dillard’s answers to these questions. They’re thought-provoking, and I want to hear your reactions to them. This chapter makes me think of Job, the Scriptural example of a man who lost everything, who must have felt the “waste” of life more deeply and poignantly than any other living being. We all have moments or seasons in which we taste Job’s wrestling and questioning, his anger and despair. The fact that things are amiss, that they often seem monstrous, compels us to quake with anger, to rage, and to mourn. To do so is human. The questions we ask about death, and the answers we find, shape who we are and who we will become.
This week, read Chapter 10: “Fecundity.” As you read, consider the following questions:
What realities in nature are hard for you to swallow or reckon with? What aspects of this chapter ring true for you?
Where have you found answers to your own questions regarding death, suffering, or “wastefulness” in the natural world?
For this week’s outdoor challenge: try to spend four hours outside. In that time, are there insects or other creatures you see that challenge your notion of the beautiful? What do you notice about them? How might you appreciate them?
These are great, penetrating questions Grace, and I love your observation on how Dillard chooses her words for sound, texture and emotion.
I experienced a substantial sense of deja vu reading this as I few weeks ago I wrote an essay that explored pretty much the exact themes and questions you highlighted here. I asked 'why is there an abundance of death associated with life?"
https://overthefield.substack.com/p/among-death-an-abundance-of-life (I hope you don't mind me posting it here).
The answer I landed on was, in Christian terms, that it is a visual reminder that ultimately life triumphs death. In the fallen world death is an ever-present reality, and a necessity for life to perpetuate (every time you eat something you are engaging in an intimate relationship predicated on death - either of plant or animal). However, God has woven out of the 'waste of death' life to come forth and therefore in a sense death then becomes the servant of life. However, the gruesomeness and ugliness of the creatures (decomposers, scavengers etc) that recycle death for us remind us that although necessary for the perpetuation of life, death remains a tragedy.
"Fecundity" is a pretty word, I like the way it rolls off the tongue. Seems like it might be a good name for a girl whose parents want lots of grandchildren :)
I have been dealing with fecundity first hand in my vegetable garden over the past few months, encouraging the fecundity of my vegetable plants and discouraging the fecundity of the beetles that want to eat those plants. I experience no remorse whatsoever as I knock the beetles from my pole bean leaves into a bowl of soapy water; I watch with pleasure as the beetles drown. I feel a little guilty admitting that, but beetles are not benign and my job is to grow food for our table.