Fear and Wonder
'Have we rowed out to thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?'
In between haphazard weather spells this week, my children helped plant some flowers in our garden. We weeded and raked, then tucked our baby plants into the earth. Suddenly, I saw a giant pill bug—one of the biggest I’ve seen—waddling past me (it felt like the bug was waddling, even if pill bugs don’t waddle). I showed it to my daughters.
The five-year-old was excited by the pill bug for a brief second. “I want to touch it!” she cried. But after she had touched it, she was frightened and began to cry. She tried to squish the pill bug that, moments ago, delighted her.
This evening, as I re-read Dillard’s opening chapter in Tinker Creek, I thought of that moment in the garden. How often wonder and fear are bound up together. We are drawn to the strange, the unexpected, and the mysterious. But we are also frightened by it. This is often obvious in children. But Dillard’s chapter highlights the fact that we all find ourselves, at different moments in our lives, awash in terror and awe.
I remember watching a friend’s father carry a dead rattlesnake into our campground one summer, showing us its long, graceful body and its huge rattle. It struck me, as I touched the strange rattle, how lively and powerful this creature would have been before its death.
I remember driving through South Dakota two summers ago, and watching the sky erupt in endless shimmering threads of lightning. It danced for hours, illuminating the darkness with breathless persistence. After a while, the beauty inspired a sort of quiet, reverent dread. How could this awful beauty persist?
“Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, ‘The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?’ It’s a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms?” (PATC, page 9)
What do we think of the created universe? It seems Dillard’s opening chapter prompts us to consider this question through a few different images, or visions of creatureliness.
The first is that of the old tom cat, who leaves bloody paw prints on Dillard’s chest in the mornings. “The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain,” Dillard writes. “I never knew.”
The second is that of the giant water bug, seen only in and through its decimating impact. Dillard watches the bug suck the life out of a frog—but all she sees of the water bug itself is “an oval shadow,” which hangs in the water and then glides away.
These first two images emphasize the darkness—and even the cruelty—surrounding what is known. Blood and deflated frogs are not your usual pleasant nature book meditations. But that seems to be part of Dillard’s point. It emphasizes the centrality of theodicy in this work. To focus only on the sweet, the lovely, and the pleasant is to overlook a great deal. And we shouldn’t ignore the things that make our stomachs turn, the things we can’t understand.
The first half of this chapter, then, emphasizes darker images of what nature is and means. The second half, as you shall see, turns more toward beauty. Both of these things, Dillard emphasizes, are mystery. Both inspire their own forms of dread and awe.
I’m going to start a thread for discussion, but below are a few questions for you to consider and comment on here, if you prefer!
What struck you as you read the first ~8 pages of Tinker Creek? What questions do you have thus far?
Are there moments when you’ve felt the combined fear and awe Dillard seems to describe in the opening of this chapter?
Dillard writes of “active” mysteries—objects in nature that are in a state of constant creation and uncertainty, like Tinker Creek—and “passive” mysteries, which are “giant, restful, absorbent,” like mountains (page 5). Where do you notice active and passive mysteries in your own life?
Have you started your outdoors challenge yet? How’s it going?
In the next 3-4 days, try to finish chapter 1 (about seven more pages), and complete this week’s challenge if you haven’t yet! I’ll be back with another post on Tuesday.
I'll come back to consider your questions, but I just wanted to say, thank you so much for recommending this book! I absolutely loved it - so much so that I couldn't stop in the middle of Chapter 1 :)
I’m catching up to you all this week - this book has been on my reading list for years and a book club is just the reason I needed to begin. Thanks for linking to the video of the giant water bug. Dillard’s description was so crazy/gruesome, I felt I needed to see it in action!
Mysteries have been on my mind lately, the way the Church embraces them as central to our faith, true and believable but much bigger than ourselves, to the point that while the whole may be known, the majority of it is unknowable (but utterly ponderable). The idea of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ mysteries provides additional food for thought.
Thank you!