Jenny (Reading Envy)'s Reviews > Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

You think Annie Dillard is talking about parasitic wasps and then WHAM she's talking about God or humanity. That's what the journey of reading this book is like. She writes throughout one year at Tinker Creek in Virginia, observing and pondering in a way only she can.

Between this book and Holy the Firm, I suspect Dillard considers herself a bit of an anchorite. She specifically mentions that while she is writing this book, she is reading the Apophthegmata, and I think I'm learning that it is the way she limits herself to a small place - a writing room, a creek - that allows her to see more in it than others would.

Near the end, she instructs the reader:

"Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have 'not gone up into the gaps.' The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; They are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock - more than a maple - a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you."

That pretty much sums up what she does throughout the book - every snake, every tree, every egg sac. I have far deeper to go for my own study, but don't want to bog the review down too much.