Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1974

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-13

Chapters 14-15

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Themes

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Themes

Faith and the Nature of the Divine

The first chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek establishes that the book is spiritual as the narrator poses sweeping theological questions about the nature of God. In particular, the narrator struggles with whether God can be known and whether nature presents truths about God’s cruelty or beauty. The first half of the book emphasizes the beauty of nature and suggests that God’s nature is revealed through it. As the narrator watches fish swim in Tinker Creek, she becomes lost in her observation. Later, she describes this experience as a loss of self-consciousness and an absorption in the present moment. The power of the present becomes the marker for spiritual experience. Each time the narrator loses her sense of self and notes the complexity of present existence, she experiences intense emotionality. As the narrator confronts extreme beauty or extreme cruelty in nature, she describes feeling overwhelmed and unable to breathe. Her experiences mirror biblical descriptions of encounters with God or angels.

The second half of the book centers on the theological concept via negativa, which asserts that God is unknowable. The question overlaps significantly with the problem of suffering because the world’s cruelty seems so incomprehensible from a human perspective. When the narrator confronts violence in nature, she wonders whether existence is merely chaos or if God has completely turned his back on his creation. The observation of a giant water bug sucking the life out of a frog changes the narrator forever. She cannot forget the brutal image of a sinking frog skin next to the creek. She carefully details parasitic wasps and the shadowy figures that stalk the creek at night. It appears God has abandoned nature, but the narrator also leaves open the possibility that she simply does not (and cannot) understand God’s nature and purposes. If one could see the world from God’s point of view, she suggests, it would perhaps be the human response to suffering that is “freakishly amiss” rather than the suffering itself.

Ultimately, the narrator determines that God is neither one thing nor the other. Instead, God is all-encompassing—both beauty and cruelty, knowable and unknowable. This is why seeking God requires total openness; a person can’t pick and choose which aspects of divinity they want to experience but must rather “ignore” or “see” it. Such openness is difficult, the narrator suggests, because it requires accepting that God’s priorities are not one’s own. However, it is also transformative and purifying, as Dillard explores via the waters of separation.

Cruelty and Beauty in Nature

Throughout Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the narrator struggles with two sides of nature: beauty and cruelty. At times, she is overwhelmed by the inherent beauty of the wilderness by the creek. She laughs while watching grasshoppers leap in the meadow and loses her breath witnessing a bird lift tufts of thistledown from a seedpod. As sunlight moves across the mountains and as the trees fill with the golden fluttering wings of monarchs, she is dazzled by the sheer brilliance of nature’s glory. At other times, the cruelty of the wilderness overwhelms her. A tomcat climbs in her window and leaves bloody paw prints all along her chest. A giant water bug sucks the life out of a frog. Children laugh and scream in delight as they poke and prod at a snapping turtle with a broom handle. She describes how female praying mantises kill their reproductive partners and recalls watching baby praying mantises in a jar eat one another until only two were left. Even the narrator toggles between these opposing forces. In the third chapter, as the narrator watches a coot dive back and forth to a pool of water, she considers killing the coot.

The narrator struggles to reconcile these two sides of nature, but the creek itself suggests they exist not in opposition but in tandem. Tinker Creek is not always Tinker Creek. At times, the narrator calls it “Shadow Creek,” referencing the darker side of the wilderness. One night, she loses track of time and stays at the water too late. All around her are sinister sounds and menacing shadows. The creek encompasses both sides of nature, brutality and tenderness. Likewise, the feelings that nature’s cruelty elicits in the narrator suggest continuity with nature’s beauty. When the narrator walks to the flooded creek, she finds the beautiful tableau of the first half of the book gone. She sees a whiskey bottle and hears a garbage truck backfiring. However, she is not repulsed by what she sees. Instead, she is aflame with this other side of nature: “I stood on my porch, exhilarated, unwilling to go indoors” (151). When Hurricane Agnes covers everything with darkness and rain, the narrator feels excited. Both cruelty and kindness elicit spiritual transformation.

Just as the narrator determines that both cruelty and beauty are necessary attributes of the divine, she ultimately suggests that they are necessary attributes of nature. Part of what attracts the narrator to nature is its rich variety—the many ways in which it teems with life. However, evolution drives this variety, and its flipside is death. As an example, the narrator notes the many animals that have thousands of offspring, only for a handful—presumably, the best adapted—to survive. This is what the narrator means when she describes death as “spinning the globe”: The world’s beauty is only possible because of its cruelty.

The Power of Observation

In the opening chapter, Dillard compares Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to Walden’s writing, asserting that her book is “a meteorological journal of the mind” (13), a phrase Thoreau wrote in his diaries. During her time as a grad student, Dillard studied Thoreau, questioning what his book Walden is about and determining that its subject is a pond. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is likewise a book about a creek: It details her observations of the animals and plant life surrounding the creek by her home in suburban Virginia. However, observation itself is also the book’s subject, with the narrator positioning it as a way of decoding truth about the divine and finding meaning and purpose in life itself.

As she grapples with the nature of God, the narrator determines that observation can uncover the beautiful side of God’s nature. She speaks about this observation as a moral obligation: “We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here” (11). She feels compelled to observe. It wakes her in the morning, forcing her to put on her shoes and step outside. When she is absorbed in observation, she loses her sense of self and feels lost in the present moment. Dillard describes how infants look around in bewilderment, overwhelmed and delighted by the sheer volume of things to observe. They can do this because they do not yet have self-awareness. Everything is new and changing. Her book attempts to recapture that delight—to re-engage with the present. Even when she observes cruelty, such as when the landscape changes due to flooding, she is exhilarated by seeing things afresh.

The narrator describes the compulsion to observe as the same compulsion to seek the divine. However, seeking or stalking can cloud the ability to see. For example, when the narrator observes a muskrat from a bridge, she watches the water, never noticing the small creature sidling up next to her. In the second chapter, the narrator centers her thoughts on the sensation of vision. She details the ways in which human sight is limited. Both darkness and light can inhibit and distort vision. Humans avoid direct eye contact with the sun, knowing that the intensity of its light will ruin their vision. In the case of the patients who received cataract surgery, the ability to see limited their understanding of the world. For some, things that they once found beautiful were muddied by sight. When the narrator attempts to see a bullfrog that her friends are indicating, she cannot spot it because her expectation clouds her vision.

Notably, the one time the phrase “via negativa” appears in the text itself, it is in reference to this problem. To avoid seeing only what one is looking for, the narrator advises a form of “stalking” that involves simply waiting in an “emptied” state. This emptiness contrasts with the plentiful observations of the book’s first half—i.e., via positiva’s attempts to compose a list of everything God is. In order to see God, the narrator suggests one must also remain open and allow oneself to experience the world’s “gaps”—the unknowable and the mysterious.