SOURCE: "'Into the Bladelike Arms of God:' The Quest for Meaning through Symbolic Language in Thoreau and Annie Dillard," in Denver Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 2, Fall, 1985, pp. 103-16.

[In the following essay, McConahay compares Henry David Thoreau's Walden to Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, noting that both writers focus on self in their efforts to explain the universe.]

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

                                      Thoreau, Walden

I propose to keep here what Thoreau called "a meteorological journal of the mind," telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzingly lead.

                     Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Many American writers are uncomfortable with the nonfiction genre. In her 1953 essay "Memoirs, Conversations and Diaries," Elizabeth Hardwick suggests that "the fear of outrageous vanity, of presuming to offer simply one's own ideas and moods, speaking in one's natural voice, which may appear—any number of transgressive adjectives are exact: boastful, presumptive, narcissistic, indulgent," makes writers eschew the first-person non-fiction narrative voice. Annie Dillard herself asks: "Precisely where does journalism or memoir become literature?… Formerly the novel was junk entertainment; if you wanted to write significant literature—if you wanted to do art or make an object from idea—you wrote nonfiction. We now think of nonfiction as sincere and artless." However, in her metaphysical exploration Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Dillard markedly disavows her own expertise and relies instead on her intuition as "seer" or "observer" to interpret the meaning of human experience. Likewise, Thoreau assumes a similar stance in relating his own wilderness experiment at Walden Pond, even though throughout the work he seems to address his readers, along with the rest of humanity (those of us who lead "lives of quiet desperation") in a rather condescending tone: "If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement.

Although the genre uses a deceptively spontaneous tone, a rather off-handed conversational case of expression, the constrictions of the first-person narrative are nonetheless stringent. We are well aware of Thoreau's laborious revisions in achieving the final published version of Walden. Although, as Leo Marx reveals in his appraisal of Thoreau's narrative persona, "the hero of Walden is a model of self-sufficiency, untroubled by guilt or anxiety or worldly ambition," who "lives out the fantasy of an indefinitely protracted adolescence," we know that Thoreau structured his account after the fact, as it were, to produce an organic literary and philosophical whole. Similarly, Dillard waxes rhapsodic in many early passages of Pilgrim as she reveals her own experience of nature. Nevertheless, after having been "nourished by the search within the manifold glories of nature, Dillard straight forwardly admits: "You're writing consciously, off of hundreds of index cards, often distorting the literal truth to achieve an artistic one." While the ideas intrinsic to metaphysical self-exploration germinate from objective observation of the workings of the natural world, in Thoreau's case the writer "begins with things as they are and then proceeds to celebrate them in language that adds meaning to their substance and translates what is fleeting to the level of permanent truth." Thus, the search for self-discovery blends inexorably with one's experience in the natural world.

Thoreau states at the outset that one of his primary aims in undertaking the Walden Pond experiment was to earn his living "by the labor of [his] hands only" (Walden), and he hastens to add a justification of the written work as a response to "very particular inquiries made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life." For her part, Dillard seems remarkably unconcerned about such questions, and ignores mundane matters, making few comments justifying her rationale for the journey into solitude.

For each writer, first-hand examination of Nature's mysterious ways is of paramount importance, and both Thoreau and Dillard thrive on the minute observations which only solitude can permit. In meeting Nature head-on, beyond the realm of human society, each writer arrives at an interpretation of the human experience which enables him/her to return to life with an altered, motivating perspective. The insights which Nature provides enable the writer to go back to society rejuvenated and enlightened, better able to cope with a world which had been previously untenable.

The role or position of the naturalist/writer is of extreme importance. What we encounter is actually an artist/catalyst rather than an autobiographer; thus, in the genre, it is essential that we believe the writer—that is, that we have faith in his revelations, that we see what he has seen through his writing. The aim of the naturalist/philosopher appears to be less a demonstration of the writer's individual expertise or a factual account of a wilderness experience than a summons to share a similar experience of self through the literary work. The writer encourages his reader to adopt whatever part of the work may be necessary to assist him in making his own discoveries of self. Anhorn suggests that Thoreau "uses his own experiences and revelations as examples of how anyone can derive from himself the authority for his own existence and actions. He is a 'parable maker' and a 'shepherd' of men who teaches his readers to make a religion not of Thoreau, but of himself." Dillard, also, acts as a summoner in concentrating her focus on the landscape, the minutiae of the creek-world, and diverting the reader's focus from herself. So it is that while we learn next to nothing about Annie Dillard the woman, we approximate her experience. Each writer insists that the human perception of nature around him depends upon an existential commitment to awareness. Thoreau urges: "We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep" (Walden). Dillard repeats Thoreau's message: "To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself!… It is true. I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it" (Pilgrim). "… Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there" (Pilgrim). In order for this revelation to materialize, then, the traditional American "journey into the wilderness" is an inevitable mission.

We readers are not the only ones to recognize the undeniable philosophical parallel between Dillard and Thoreau. Dillard herself repeats passages from Thoreau in Pilgrim, and appropriates themes, direction and symbols from her transcendental mentor. Even the shape of the work, the cyclical form of the journey through a calendar year, the focus on sense impressions, and the isolation of the writer could be superimposed on Thoreau's work. The fascinating fact emerges that Thoreau himself seemed to know that a kindred voice would follow his own. It is as though he anticipated his own literary descendant:

Sometimes, on Sundays I heard the bells … when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum. as if the pine needles in their horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept … There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell. (Walden)

Dillard is Thoreau's bell, at once the echo who translates his message and the "original sound" who forms a new one. "I walk out," she says, "I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell" (Pilgrim). "I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck" (Pilgrim). She compares her voice to that of a "cast iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn't make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn't catch the consonant that shaped it into sense" (Pilgrim). It is this symbolic identity that makes Dillard so multidimensional, at once a contemporary oracle and a literary anachronism.

Even more important than Thoreau's experiment in simple living at Walden Pond and Dillard's scientific observations at Tinker Creek are the writers" experimentations with utilizing a central symbol as a universal metaphor for the self. Thoreau's choice of Walden Pond ("earth's eye. looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature"; "a mirror which no stone can crack"; "a great crystal on the surface of the earth"; "the landscape's most beautiful feature"; "a perfect forest mirror") as the site for his retreat assumes direct symbolic meaning. He approaches the pond as he does his inmost self, and finds reflected in its lucid depths truths deep within him. The pond, a body of water with no apparent inlet or outlet, symbolizes the encapsulation of the self, the transcendent identity which Thoreau was convinced he would—given the circumstances of solitude—discover. Walden Pond is Thoreau's "still point at the center of the turning world." Dillard's choice of place as symbol is no less purposeful, although she is stimulated to awareness not by the transfixing gaze of a pond but by the actual movement of Tinker Creek itself on its never-ending journey in the cyclical pattern of Nature. "I had thought to live by the side of the creek in order to shape my life to its free flow," she writes (Pilgrim). She returns from the creek "exhilarated or becalmed, but always changed, alive" (Pilgrim). Both writers present their symbols as idealized loci which provide the necessary setting for self-discovery. Thoreau tells us:

Walden is a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust can dim its surface ever fresh;—a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy brush … which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still. (Walden)

while Dillard explains her awareness of her surroundings thus:

I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It's a good place to live; there's a lot to think about. The creeks—Tinker and Carvin's—are an active mystery, fresh every minute. (Pilgrim)

Whether in flow or in stasis, water symbolizes the inscrutable natural universe that exists as an intermediary between the elements of land and air. The pond and creek assume the totality of the human experience and return it, purified as it were, by a sort of sacramental healing process. In his description of the changeable color of Walden Pond, Thoreau writes: "Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both" (Walden), implying that the pond represents not just its own aqueous element, but it provides insight to the other elements through its reflective power. The truth the pond tells, then, is not a static, immovable verity at all, despite its self-contained nature. Instead, it shimmers and ripples, providing an ever-new vision to the attentive Thoreau. Dillard sees Tinker Creek as the physical emblem of movement and growth which becomes so central to her being. "The creek is the mediator, benevolent, impartial, subsuming my shabbiest evils and dissolving them, transforming them into live moles, and shiners, and sycamore leaves. It is a place even my faithlessness hasn't offended; it still flashes for me, now and tomorrow" (Pilgrim).

As symbols, the pond and the creek must necessarily reverberate beyond the confines of the individual self into realms of generalization which expand their immediate meaning. The extended metaphor Thoreau constructs reinforces the meaning of symbol itself: "What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draws lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character" (Walden). Likewise, Dillard embraces the creek as symbol: "I wonder whether what I see and seem to understand about nature is merely one of the accidents of freedom, repeated by chance before my eyes, or whether it has any counterpart in the worlds beyond Tinker Creek" (Pilgrim). Like the proverbial concentric circles issuing from a stone tossed into calm water, the symbolic inferences produced by the central images of pond and creek extend meaning beyond the shoreline and the bank of the writer's experiences. While at once providing calm and solace for their residents, both symbols uplift and transport them from self-awareness to higher planes of cosmic awareness. "The creek rests the eye, a haven, a breast; the two steep banks vault from the creek like wings" (Pilgrim). For both writers this metaphysical transformation becomes translated into a religious mode of expression which is suggested in Thoreau and explicit in Dillard. The symbols come to reflect not merely the transcendent nature of man, but ultimately the perfect nature of God. Those who behold Walden Pond experience an "activated natural-spiritual nature" and confront their true nature, their soul, their Godlike image, which is purified by the pond. Dillard approaches the creek with a reverence born of spiritual communion with the Creator. "My God, I look at the creek. It is the answer to Merton's prayer 'Give us time!' It never stops…. The creek is the One Great Giver. It is, by definition, Christmas, the incarnation" (Pilgrim). At this juncture we are confronted with Thoreau and Dillard as symbolist writers, as participants in the tradition of language-exploration. Thus we turn to an examination of how each writer views the "problem of language," its boundless potential, and its ability to produce meaning through paradox.

An obvious contrast between Thoreau's works and those of Annie Dillard might suggest that Thoreau's unquestionable transcendental philosophy allowed him a simpler scope of vision in observing the workings of Nature. His comments on the beauty, simplicity, and efficiency of Nature grow saccharine, perhaps, as a result of his certain optimism. He praises the Creator whose wondrous works make man gape in awe. Dillard, on the other hand, comes to voice her praise after enduring an excruciatingly painful observation of a Nature which is not benevolent in the least, which destroys, which repeatedly exhibits its grotesque mode of operation. The paradox, for Dillard, seems clear—if, indeed, the meaning of paradox can ever denote clarity. By embracing the grotesque aspect of Nature which instinctively repels us as an element of the non-static totality of life, of the created universe, and by seeing ourselves as part and parcel of this flux ("The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man." [Pilgrim]), we can actually come to affirm the power of the Creator. "Everything, everything is whole and a parcel of everything else. I myself am falling down, slowly, or slowly lifting up."

A close reading of Walden reveals Thoreau's own doubts about the universal goodness of God. Just as Dillard hesitates: "I have been thinking that the landscape of the intricate world that I have painted is inaccurate and lopsided. It is too optimistic" (Pilgrim). Thoreau offers an uncharacteristic confrontation with the dark underside of the creative process:

We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us and deriving health and strength from the repast … I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp … The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground. (Walden)

So the paradox is faced by both writers, and critics who label either one as purely optimistic or existentially naive ignore this aspect. However, since Thoreau appears unwilling to develop the paradox, it is worthwhile to return to Dillard's self-imposed metaphor of the bell, the resounding echo which provides overtones of meaning to the original tone or message. As she confronts the utter depravity of nature halfway through Pilgrim and faces the senseless victimization of the child Julie Norwich, Dillard's alter ego in Holy the Firm, the writer must either find a means of interpreting the horrible along with the exhilarating aspects of life or give up. She reaches a point of crisis similar to the horrors faced by Melville, and although she does not rail against Thoreauvian or Emersonian optimism, we suspect she finds their unquestioning acceptance of Nature's destructive element frustrating. She voices her deepest doubts, and balances between a forced rationalism and a hopeless desperation: "I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives" (Pilgrim). No doubt it is at this point that Dillard takes issue with Thoreau's chapter ("Economy") which describes the simple needs of the animals and the satisfaction man would experience if he could only approximate these basic requirements of life. Thus she is forced, paradoxically, to discover meaning in the grotesque, to pursue that which unhinges her perception of the beauty of nature. She poses this paradox: "Do we need more victims to remind us that we're all victims? Is this some sort of parade for which a conquering army shines up its terrible guns and rolls them up and down the streets for the people to see?" (Holy). Grumbach interprets Dillard's despair: "The maniac (God) seems to be in charge of the bitter and pied world of nature she describes at such length, with such precision, and so lovingly—a world that exists side-by-side with Thoreau's benign and God-directed beauty." For Dillard, the collision with the grotesque becomes an issue of unending existential proportions. "What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms?… Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction?" (Pilgrim).

Suddenly, through the medium of language, Dillard experiences a revelation akin to that of Thoreau atop Mount Katahdin. In viewing humanity as such a minute portion of the complexity of all creation, she admits: "It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness,a massive failure of imagination" (Pilgrim). When she comes to accept her own role in the dynamic "hurdy-gurdy of time" (Holy), the paradox of the grotesque can be transformed into affirmation. Perhaps Dillard recalls the suggestion of Thomas Merton: "Decision begins with the acceptance of one's own finiteness, one's own limitation, in fact, one's own nothingness. But when one's own nothingness is seen as a matter of personal choice, of free acceptance, and not as part of the vast, formless void of the anonymous mass, it acquires a name, a presence, a voice, an option in the actions of the real world." Dillard admits that natural phenomena are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or to its creator. "Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity, for which I would die, and I shall" (Pilgrim). The catalyst for Dillard's arrival at this point of self-realization is the operation of language itself, for "seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization" (Pilgrim). For Dillard, the ability to see steadily and unflinchingly is the same as the ability to order.

At first, Dillard fears that resolution is impossible, and she doubts, as does Thoreau, the ability of language to produce any sort of transferable meaning—that is, meaning which will reach beyond individual interpretation. In her introduction to her collection of critical essays Living By Fiction, Dillard poses the following questions: "Is the search for meaning among the high heaps of the meaningless a fool's game? Is it art's game? What is (gasp) the relationship between the world and the mind? Is knowledge possible? Do we ever discover meaning, or do we always make it up?" She continues: "Knowledge is impossible. We are precisely nowhere, sinking on an entirely imaginary ice floe, into entirely imaginary seas themselves adrift" (Holy). The paradox, of course, is that resolution comes only through language, which is itself suggestive and imprecise. Thoreau feared the inadequacy of language to express his ideas, but felt instinctively that the writer could transcend this barrier. "A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself" (Walden). Yet Thoreau questions his own ability to convey essential meaning. "I fear chiefly lest my expression not be extravagant enough, may not wander enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced;… the volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains" (Waiden). Ultimately, Dillard and Thoreau must invest all their hope in the innate power of language, however weighted with subjective referents and elusive symbols it may be, which alone enables man to interpret the totality of human experience. It is, quite literally, the only tool we have. Thus, instead of turning from the ambiguity of language in frustration, Dillard comes to realize that although language cannot signify things as they are, because none of us knows things as they are, a writer's language "does an airtight job of signifying his perceptions of things as they are" (Living).

Symbols, then, as constructs of language, can be at once "personalized" by individual perception and "shared" because they spring from agreed-upon conventions of meaning (Living). Paradoxically, they are formed from language and yet they almost simultaneously escape definition through language. As we confront the presence of symbols in Walden and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, we begin to realize the explosive potential of symbolic meaning itself. "Language is weighted with referents. It is like a beam of light on Venus. The writer, unlike the painter, sculptor, or composer, cannot form his ideas of order directly in his materials; for as soon as he writes the least noun, the whole world starts pouring onto his page …" "There is no such thing as a mere symbol. When you climb to the higher levels of abstraction, symbols, those enormous, translucent planets, are all there is. They are at once your only tools of knowledge and that knowledge's only object" (Living). Through affirmation of this paradox, Dillard admits that we must dedicate ourselves to continual reinterpretation of symbols if meaning through language can ever be achieved. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek stands not as a repetition of Thoreau's in Walden but as a symbolic extension of the work. Dillard's sense of order relies on this "unique cognitive property of symbol: there is no boundary, and probably no difference, between symbol and the realm it comes to mean" (Living).