Sojourners in the Suburbs

'Pilgrim At Tinker Creek' Book Club, Week 1

Paul Cézanne, Roses in a Bottle [recto], 1900/1904

“We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence… ‘Seem like we’re just set down here,’ a woman said to me recently, ‘and don’t nobody know why.’”

– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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Every moment of encounter with the world invites us to wonder. We never see or sense all that exists in a given space. To stand on a little plot of earth is to be surrounded by incalculable seeable things: grass, trees, cacti, birds, or bugs. But it is also to be surrounded by incalculable unseeable things: microbes, fungi, bacteria, infinitesimal atoms, and more. We stand amid the glory, like Markel, and cannot love enough, see enough. We cannot comprehend the why or the wherefore. But perhaps our ignorance is less of a thorn than we believe it to be. Beauty and wonder exist, even within that incalculable mystery.

Annie Dillard compiled Pilgrim at Tinker Creek from journal entries penned while living in Roanoke, Virginia. The book was published in 1974, when Dillard was only 29 years old. In it, the author traverses the woods and hills surrounding Tinker Creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She sits and watches, then meditates on what she sees. The book is full of creatures, large and small. It contains biology, botany, history, and theology. It is an eclectic volume. But as Eudora Welty once put it, “The book is a form of meditation, written with a headlong urgency, about seeing.”

Insofar as the book is about seeing — about our phenomenal connections with the world around us — it has much in common with Thoreau’s Walden. It calls its readers to form new habits of encounter (and therefore, new habits of wonder) as they move through the world. But Dillard’s book is also a powerful work of theodicy. It is a wholehearted endeavor to consider the why and the wherefore. Dillard wrestles with God’s existence in a world that is astounding, frightening, and strange. This, too, forms the eclectic beauty and challenge of Tinker Creek.

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If you’d like to join in this summer’s book club, buy or borrow Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and aim to read the first 8 pages of Tinker Creek (half of Chapter 1) this week.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this month’s book club is also a challenge — a challenge to spend a little more time outdoors, in reflection, solitude, or exploration.

So this week, I have another “aim” for you: try to spend at least 30 minutes outdoors by yourself. You can, of course, customize this challenge according to your own personal needs. The goal is to perhaps spend a little less time in the car or the house, and a little more time outside in nature — bird-watching, walking, running, looking for frogs, or pruning flowers.

I often think that I have to escape someplace “special” in order to engage in this sort of attentive quiet. But if I recall correctly, Dillard didn't write Tinker Creek from a cabin in the woods. She was living in the suburbs. Hopefully this is encouraging and challenging to you, as it is to me. Wherever we are, we are in the world. There are glorious things to wonder at. There is still mystery.