SOURCE: "'Pray without Ceasing': Annie Dillard among the Nature Writers," in Earthly Words: Essays on Contemporary American Nature and Environmental Writers, edited by John Cooley, University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp. 69-86.

"Sons and daughters of Thoreau abound in contemporary American writing," Edward Abbey writes in his introduction to Abbey's Road (1979), mentioning Edward Hoagland, Joseph Wood Krutch, Wendell Berry, John McPhee, Ann Zwinger, and Peter Matthiessen, as well as himself. He reserves his highest praise for Annie Dillard, who "is the true heir of the Master." The others are Thoreauvian primarily in their identification with special locales—from Central Park in Hoagland's essay to Zwinger's Rockies. Abbey's one objection to Dillard's "otherwise strong, radiant book [A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek] is the constant name dropping. Always of one name"—God (Abbey's Road). Abbey's assessment is astute, because it highlights the essential characteristics of Annie Dillard's nature writing: her writing about place, the language she uses to evoke her experiences, and her religious preoccupation and vocation. Abbey's assessment is also eccentric, because his objection to her religious preoccupation is directed at Dillard's most distinctive achievements in the nature essays of A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). The objection would apply also to Holy the Firm (1977) and Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), the two other Dillard books that use nature as a touchstone for spiritual insight.

Nature writing in America has always been religious or quasireligious. All the important studies on the subgenre conclude that nature writing is "in the end concerned not only with fact but with fundamental spiritual and aesthetic truth." That is true of essays by Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, Aldo Leopold, Edwin Teale, and Joseph Wood Krutch, whose works represent more than a century of American nature writing. And Edward Abbey's work is infused with spiritual impulse, as he engages "Mystery."

I suspect that Abbey's objection to Dillard's name-dropping is that her God is identifiably Judeo-Christian. That objection is understandable, because nature writers and, more broadly, conservationists, environmentalists, and students of American responses to nature have consistently held the Judeo-Christian tradition responsible for land abuse. In A Sand County Almanac (1949), for example, conservationist and nature essayist Aldo Leopold objected to an "Abrahamic concept of land" as commodity for technological man's use. Historian Lynn White, Jr., concluded that the root of the postwar ecological crisis is a Judeo-Christian tradition that desacralizes nature and gives man "dominion" over it. Rejecting Judeo-Christian anthrocentricity, writers have turned to spiritual alternatives. In "Lord Man: The Religion of Conservation," Steven Fox identifies many nature writers and conservationists who "embraced a variety of non-Christian religions." Typical of many, poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder embraced Zen Buddhism and drew from Native American religious spiritual practices. Others, such as Joseph Wood Krutch, rejected Christian orthodoxy at first and a stoical humanism later, to embrace, finally, a pantheism that gave Krutch the profound sense that "we are all in this together," and that thus mirrored the thought of photographer Ansel Adams, who described his spiritual perspective simply as "a vast impersonal pantheism." A pantheistic perspective fits well with the insights of modern ecological science, as is seen in Aldo Leopold's essay "Thinking Like a Mountain," an account of his "conversion" from an anthropocentric to a biocentric stance.

Nature writing, then, has been broadly religious in the sense that Wendell Berry finds religion in the poetry he most highly values—poetry that has a "sense of the presence of mystery or divinity in the world" and "attitudes of wonder or awe or humility before the works of the creation." Such poets, like nature writers, go on what Berry calls "a secular pilgrimage," which "seeks the world of the creation, the created world in which the Creator, the formative and quickening spirit, is still immanent and at work."

Theology has always attracted Annie Dillard. As an adolescent attending a Presbyterian summer vacation bible camp, she realized: "I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean." A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm, and Teaching a Stone to Talk are saturated with religious thought, longing, and experience. Dillard is after the "pearl of great price," religious vision, which will reconcile the self—which is pulled between faith and doubt—with a nature that is often cruel and ugly, and with a God who seems as irrational as loving. She is within meditative traditions and records repeated mystical experiences. She prepares for mystical reconciliation by performing rituals that mingle conventions for encountering nature that are found in nature writing with Judeo-Christian traditions and rituals. She is an offbeat Christian who walks in nature and reads science as part of her preparation for vision.

In Holy the Firm, Dillard finds unsatisfactory the "accessible and universal view," mentioned by Wendell Berry and "held by (Meister) Eckhart and by many peoples in various forms,… that the world is immanation, that God is in the thing, and eternally present here if nowhere else." That view is "scarcely different from pantheism," she writes, because from that perspective, "Christ is redundant and all things are one." This statement sets Dillard apart from the other nature writers; her perspective is Christian.

Dillard's books are dotted with biblical allusions, and she unselfconsciously uses the word Christ. During the central mystical moment in Holy the Firm, to cite the most extended example, she is walking home from a country store with communion wine for her church when suddenly she is filled with light, "everything in the world is translucent," the bay below is "transfigured," "everything is whole, and a parcel of everything else," and she sees that "Christ is being baptized" by John. Christ "lifts from the water. Water beads on his shoulders. I see the water in balls as heavy as planets, a billion beads of water as weighty as worlds, and he lifts them up on his back as he rises." Dillard writes throughout Holy the Firm in imagery that evokes the opening of the book, when she wakens, looks across Puget Sound, and greets the morning:

I wake in a god…. Someone is kissing me—already…. I open my eyes. The god lifts from the water. His head tills the bay. He is Puget Sound, the Pacific; his breast rises from pastures; his fingers are firs; islands slide wet down his shoulders. Islands slip blue from his shoulders and glide over the water, the empty, lighted water like a stage.

In fact the entire structure of Holy the Firm is Christian. Dillard equates the three days the book spans to Creation, the Fall, and Redemption; and the subjective framework is "the tripartite pattern of faith, doubt, and faith renewed." Robert Dunn notes that the book's three chapters parallel the "three stages of the mystic way—illumination, purgation, and union."

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek also opens with Dillard awakening to a world seen through Christian experience, even if her doubt is constant. She is, after all, an anchorite and a pilgrim, awakened in the morning to the possibility of mystery by her cat, which has left her "body covered with paw prints in blood: I looked as though I'd been painted with roses." This imagery is profoundly linked to the Judeo-Christian tradition through the Passover, on the one hand, and through Christ's redemptive blood and the rose symbolizing Mary, on the other. The central mystical experience in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the vision of "the tree with the lights in it," is a revelation of "Christ's incarnation," which Dillard accepts despite liberal theological objections to a belief that Christ's incarnation took place at a particular time and a particular place. She affirms "the scandal of particularity," because "I never saw a tree that was no tree in particular"; the tree with lights on it is, after all, a particular backyard cedar.

Though Annie Dillard sees from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy, she is still heterodox and unconventional. Critic Margaret Reimer has shown that though "Dillard stands in the orthodox Christian tradition" in her views of evil, for example, "her conclusions (or the lack of them) are far from the traditional Christian answers." Dillard has always been uncomfortable within orthodoxy, even though, paradoxically, she is also uncomfortable outside a Christian perspective. From childhood on, she was neither quite inside nor completely outside conventional religious experience. When she went off to a Presbyterian summer bible camp where she learned she had a "head for religious ideas" and got "miles of Bible by memory," she was aware that her parents would have objected to the evangelical intensity of "the faith-filled theology … only half a step out of a tent." As an adolescent, she was already absorbed in the theological question that is at the center of both Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm—"If the all-powerful Creator directs the world, then why all this suffering?" She had written a paper about the Book of Job, but she had also quit the Presbyterian church. Her off-tempo relation to Christianity is caught in the moment when she meets with her family's minister to tell him of her decision to quit but, at the same time, accepts from him books by C. S. Lewis, including The Problem of Pain. More than two decades later, she still has not found her institutional place, although she attends church. In Teaching a Stone to Talk, she notes that she has "overcome a fiercely anti-Catholic upbringing in order to attend Mass"; but she does so "simply and solely to escape Protestant guitars" and likens her attendance to having "run away from home and joined the circus as a dancing bear."

At times, Dillard strains to remain Christian. For instance, she rejects pantheistic immanence—that "God is in the thing," referred to above—but cannot quite accept the conventional Christian view that "emanating from God, and linked to him by Christ, the work is infinitely other than God" (Holy the Firm). While the concept of eminence permits a representation of Christ that allows for the salvation of "the souls of men," it leaves the rest of nature "irrelevant and nonparticipant," unreal to "time," "unknowable, an illusory, absurd, accidental, and overelaborate state"—fallen, in a word. Unwilling to accept a view that denies a sacralized, familiar natural world, Dillard entertains a view from "esoteric Christianity" that there is a substance called "Holy the Firm" that is "in touch" with both the lowest of material reality—the "salts and earths"—and the absolute. The absolute and the most ordinary aspects of nature are connected: "Matter and spirit are of a piece but distinguishable; God has a stake guaranteed in all the world" (Holy the Firm). Characteristically, affirmations are undercut, this time with the anticlimactic aside that "these are only ideas" (Holy the Firm). For Dillard, however, there is no such thing as "only" ideas. She proves herself outside orthodoxy and beyond conventional Christianity, without abandoning Christian preoccupations, beliefs, and longings.

As Reimer has shown, Dillard's "theology is always dialectical" and contains "both the conventional language of religious mysticism as well as more macabre elements of religious experience." The dialectical tension is between "the material and the spiritual, the natural and the transcendent … the beauty and the horror within the natural world." I agree with Reimer's assessment that "the power of Dillard's vision arises from her strength to maintain the contradictions within a single vision." Dillard's vision is contradictory at its most extreme, and dialectical in its most powerful insights. The kinds of ritual she creates and writes about explain in large measure how she balances these unresolved contradictions within a single, unified vision. Her rituals are familiar to both religious practitioners and nature observers.

Students of myth and ritual know that worldviews, or myths, contain contradictions and unresolved mysteries that adherents live with despite doubt, and that ritual is a way both of moving toward deeper understanding and of affirming belief publicly—a way of acting, without complete knowledge. Annie Dillard seeks a vision that is the "pearl of great price," which "may be found" but "may not be sought" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), so the question becomes "how then is she to act? How is the search to be conducted?" Annie Dillard's ritual acts allow her to affirm life and God without a theological resolution of fundamental religious questions. Through these rituals, she strives for—and experiences—reconciliation between herself, a sometimes horrible—as well as beautiful—nature, and a mysterious God who, at times, seems as maniacal as loving. Fittingly, the rituals are a blend of Judeo-Christian rites in nature; they are the rituals of stalking, seeing, and dancing.

Walking, as more than exercise, has a long tradition in literature, from Plato's walks when he formulated his dialogues, to Saint Augustine's walk on the seashore, to the walks of seventeenth-century Christian literary walkers: "The walk is an occasion and setting for revelation, for a sudden increase in their awareness of the indwelling of God in the world." Walkers are pilgrims seeking visions. As Thoreau comments in "Walking," those few who understand "the art of Walking," who "have a genius for sauntering," are linked with medieval pilgrims about whom children exclaimed, "'There goes a-Sainte-Terre,' a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander." Those who walk in Thoreau's way

saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn. ("Walking")

Thoreau's imagery of light is echoed in Dillard's mystical moments, as it is in all the mystical tradition, including the Christian. John Elder writes that for inveterate walker William Wordsworth, the "Pilgrim" of "The Prelude," "walking is a process of reconciliation: it provides the dynamic unity of his life" and art. "The Prelude," for example, is a work organized in part by walking. Elder, in ways applicable to Dillard's essays, writes about walking in the works of others, such as contemporary poet A. R. Ammons. That is particularly true if we remember that Dillard's vision is dialectical. Writing about Ammons, Elder might as well be writing about Dillard: "There is no absolute unity available for existence in a physical, and thus temporal, work. Rather, going from one foot to the other, human life takes its passage through a universe of particulars"; and the major response to the relations between nature, human imagination, and spirit is "one of ambivalence: right foot, left foot."

In the chapter "Stalking" in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard tells us she learned to stalk fish and muskrats, who "by their very mystery and hiddenness crystallize the quality of my summer life at the creek." Learning to stalk muskrats took "several years," until one evening, when she had "lost" herself, "lost the creek, the day, lost everything but (the creek's) amber depth," a young muskrat "appeared on top of the water, floating on its back" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). She was ecstatic. The excitement and wonder of sighting an "ordinary" muskrat through her ritual stalking is described with the language of revelation. She records her joy and surprise "at having the light come on so suddenly, and at having my consciousness returned to me all at once and bearing (a) … muskrat." Fearing that the encounter was a once in a lifetime experience, she stalks muskrats day and night; and at the point she sees another, she reports, with the Thoreauvian extravagance that Edward Abbey so admired. "My life changed." What Dillard calls stalking is, obviously, closer to meditating. The "via negative," she says, is a form of stalking "as fruitful as actual pursuit." She waits "emptied," like "Newton under the apple tree, Buddha under the bo." Dillard reminds us that Ezekiel "excoriates" false prophets who will not go up into the gaps, and she exhorts us to "stalk the gaps." which are the cliffs on the rock where you "cower to see the back parts of God." Such stalking will reveal "more than a maple," she writes; it will reveal "a universe."

Dillard's walks around Tinker Creek in Virginia and her stalking of the muskrat reveal not merely the habits of the secretive animal, for the mystery and hiddenness she often attributes to muskrats are those she most often attributes to God. Moreover, her personal ritual of stalking is ultimately described in Christian terms: on the night her life changed as a result of seeing the muskrat, she summarizes the nature of the stalking ritual as "Knock; seek; ask," obviously a variant of the biblical "Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and ye shall find: knock, and it shall be opened to you. For everyone that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." In Dillard's work the nature-writing conventions of encountering nature directly and immediately through such ordinary activities as walking while one is open to aesthetic and spiritual experience mingle and meld with Christian ritual, tradition, and experience. Ordinary experience fuses with the millennial, the temporal with the transcendent.

In Holy the Firm and Teaching a Stone to Talk Dillard is more conventional in her use of the walking ritual than in Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, but she makes the same points. In Holy the Firm, she is deeply troubled by the terrible suffering of Julie Norwich, who is in the hospital, her face burned in a plane accident. Worrying about and questioning the Christian response to the sufferings of the innocent, Dillard, near despair, asks, "Do we really need more victims to remind us that we're all victims?" and she reminds herself that we are "sojourners in a land we did not make, a land with no meaning of itself and no meaning we can make for it alone" (Holy the Firm). In this state of mind, she feels unworthy to buy the communion wine she had volunteered to get, but she goes anyway. She walks home, "and I'm on the road again walking, my right hand forgetting my left. I'm out on the road again walking, and toting a backload of God." As she starts up a hill, the landscape starts "to utter its infinite particulars," and she lists particular features of the landscape about her—"blackberry brambles, white snowberries, red rose hips, gaunt and clattering broom." Soon, the particulars are alive: "mountains are raw nerves;… the trees, the grass … are living petals of mind." Finally,

walking faster and faster, weightless, I feel the wine. It sheds light in slats through my rib cage, and fills the buttressed vaults of my ribs with light pooled and buoyant. I am moth; I am light. I am prayer and I can hardly see.

At that moment, she experiences the vision that is central to the book; she beholds Christ being baptized.

The essays in Teaching a Stone to Talk often expand the notion of ordinary walking to larger journeys and expeditions. In "Sojourner" she notes that the title word appears frequently in the Old Testament and "invokes a nomadic people's sense of vagrancy, a praying people's knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people's intuition of sharp loss" (Teaching a Stone to Talk). Thus, she alternates, in this essay and in her writing in general, between "thinking of the planet as time" and "as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners." A number of the essays in Teaching a Stone to Talk explore the dialectic between being at home and being estranged, as she moves her setting from Tinker Creek to places as remote as the Napo River in the Ecuadorian jungle and the North Pole. In "An Expedition to the Pole," she combines personal experience, history, and fantasy. The personal experience of visiting the Arctic and viewing the Arctic Sea fuses with the history of various Polar expeditions that entailed enormous suffering for ill-equipped explorers. She fantasizes that she has "quit my ship and set out on foot over the polar ice," and that she has traveled across an ice floe, where she encounters both historical personages and members of the congregation of the Catholic church she has been attending. They are all together on a spiritual quest. Her attendance at Catholic services is part of her search for "the Pole of Relative inaccessibility," or "The Absolute." She asks, "How often have I mounted this same expedition, has my absurd barque set out half-caulked for the Pole?" And she quotes Pope Gregory in seeking to define her aim: "'To attain to somewhat of the unencompassed light, by stealth'." Although Dillard emphasizes alienated experience because she is poorly and absurdly equipped for the spiritual expedition to the Pole, she ends the essay with a fantasy in which she is on the floor with the church members, "banging on a tambourine" and singing loudly. "How can any of us tone it down?" she asks, "for we are nearing the Pole." Dillard actually seeks and creates the conditions for ecstatic, mystical experience; doubt and hope are held in balance within the imaginative framework of sojourning, of exploring on foot.

Annie Dillard walks and stalks so that she can "see" in more than one sense. To see truly, she must prepare herself ritualistically, must become both innocent and informed. Dillard defines innocence as "the spirit's unselfconscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once receptiveness and total concentration" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Innocence is a state she values as highly as did the romantics and Christians before her. That may be why she often identifies the stalking and seeing rituals with childhood and childhood games. "Only children keep their eyes open," she writes. She describes nature as "like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot?" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). The universe is a merry-go-round, and the cost is a child's rubber duck. Dillard evokes her childhood, as well as others', and always in the service of seeing, in all senses of the word, the microcosm of Tinker Creek: "If I seek the senses and skill of children … I do so only, solely, and entirely that I might look well into the creek" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). A major motif of the book is, as I have already noted, the hiddenness of God as well as of nature. Childhood games are played to coax the Creator from hiding. She alludes to John Knoepfle's poem in which "'christ is red rover … and the children are calling / come over come over'" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Longing for God, she compares the banging of her will against rock with a child beating on a door and calling: "Come on out!… I know you're there."

That she seeks to see by entering "the spirit's unselfconscious state" through "pure devotion to any object" is one of many obvious signs that Annie Dillard is intensely aware of her absorption in meditative traditions. Her efforts to see are rewarded in the numerous mystical moments recorded in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm, and Teaching a Stone to Talk. One summer evening, when she is practicing being "an unscrupulous observer" of shiners feeding in Tinker Creek,

something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone.

                              (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek).

Because of such moments, critics have rightly seen in Dillard's mystical experiences parallels with Ralph Waldo Emerson's experiences and views recorded in "Nature." Dillard's observation that "there is [a] kind of seeing that involves a letting go [and] when I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied" is justifiably compared with Emerson's famous statement that "I became a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me."

Dillard also is Emersonian in preparing herself for vision by exercising her "Understanding," by disciplining her nature experiences with scientific information and ideas. While she rightly states, "I am no scientist" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), her essays are packed with allusions to scientific reading of all sorts. Not surprisingly, those allusions fall into two, dichotomous categories. One evokes a nature that is deterministic—the insect world, in which a giant water bug sucks out the innards of a frog, "a monstrous and horrifying thing" that leaves her deeply shaken. In a more light-hearted moment, she makes the same point in a chapter about nature's horrors: "Fish gotta swim and bird [sic] gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another." The other category of scientific allusions focuses on the indeterminant nature described by twentieth-century physics. In the chapter "Stalking," Dillard has a two-page commentary on Werner Heisenberg's "Principle of Indeterminancy," and she quotes, in addition, physicists Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, whose views, she notes gleefully, mean that "some physicists now are a bunch of wild-eyed, raving mystics" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). To illustrate, she quotes Eddington's statement that the Principle of Indeterminancy "'leaves us with no clear distinction between the Natural and the Supernatural1'."

Critics, especially Gary Mcllroy and Margaret Reimer, have done very well in pointing out Dillard's response to science, especially to the Principle of Indeterminancy. Her ritual preparation for seeing, however, has depended on a broader range of science and science-related reading than has been discussed. Often her reading is specific to phenomena she observes. When she stalks the muskrat, she refers to biologist and expert on muskrats Paul Errington. She refers to biologist and science historian Howard Ensign Evans on dragonflies, limnologist Robert E. Coker on plankton movement, Rutherford Platt on trees (noting that his The Great American Forest is "one of the most interesting books ever written"), and so on. In Emersonian fashion, she "disciplines" her "Understanding" in preparing for visions.

Two writers important in disciplining Dillard's understanding are Frenchman Henri Fabre and American Edwin Way Teale, sources for a number of her comments on the horrors of the insect world. In her chapter "The Fixed" in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which contains some of her most pessimistic and horrific conclusions, Dillard refers frequently to turn-of-the-century Fabre. She notes that "even a hardened entomologist like F. Henri Fabre confessed to being startled witless every time" a praying mantis strikes its prey, and she quotes a long passage of his describing the macabre mantis mating ritual during which the female gnaws on her "swain" until there is just that "masculine stump" going "on with the business" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Edwin Way Teale is the most frequently cited writer in the other dark chapter in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, "Fecundity," in which nature seems primarily a matter of eating, breeding, and dying: the "universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die…. It is fixed and blind, programmed to kill." She illustrates this grim, amoral natural world with examples drawn from Teale's The Strange Lives of Familiar Insects, which is, she exclaims, a "book I couldn't live without."

Although Dillard draws on Fabre's and Teale's writings to underscore a deterministic, amoral natural world that may be "the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with unlimited capital," these writers achieved their fame as popularizers of science by maintaining optimistic spiritual outlooks. Fabre never accepted Darwinian evolutionary theory and remained a devout Roman Catholic. A humble French provincial who was not accepted by the academy until very late in life, Fabre was less the laboratory scientist in a white lab coat than a living example of the persona familiar to the nature essay in general and to Annie Dillard's essay in particular—the amateur who is faithful to his local environment and who experiences awe and wonder in nature's small moments. Edwin Way Teale, who admired Fabre and introduced the English translation of his collected essays, is also optimistic, despite his chronicles of the violent and grotesque insect world. In Speaking for Nature, Paul Brooks describes Teale as one of the finest "literary naturalists" since Thoreau. He adds that Teale, with others, has "opened the eyes of millions of readers … to a widespread feeling of kinship with the other forms of life with which we share the earth." From his Strange Lives of Familiar Insects to his widely read and well-regarded books on the American seasons, Teale's works reflect the affirmation and joy characteristic of American nature writers and of one side of Annie Dillard's dialectical view. The two men offered her more than scientific information.

In her intellectual preparations for reaching a state of innocence followed by mystical insight, Dillard's reading is often as much the focus of her attention as the natural object itself. Some of the more important categories in her diverse reading are theology and other religious matters (Martin Buber, Thomas Merton, Julia[n] of Norwich, and the Koran); art (DaVinci, Van Gogh, Breughel, and El Greco); adventure (Lewis and Clark, Heyerdahl, and the Franklin Polar expedition); and literature (Thoreau, Coleridge, Blake, Goethe, and Eliot). A full accounting of the interplay between her reading and her responses to nature is impractical here, but one intellectual source is crucial—the philosopher Heraclitus.

Dillard associates Heraclitus with views close to those of quantum physics, that "nature is wont to hide herself." Moreover, his perspective is akin to her dialectical vision. Dillard opens Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with the following epigraph from Heraclitus:

      It ever was, and is, and shall be,
      ever-living Fire, in measures being
      kindled and in measures going out.

Heraclitus was the philosopher of opposites. But they are opposites that have underlying connections; for instance, good and evil define one another. The same is true for all natural events. Though they are described and seen in terms of opposites, there is an underlying interrelatedness, a hidden connection, of which fire is the physical embodiment. The epigraph in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the pervasive fire imagery in Holy the Firm are signs that the intellectual aspects of Dillard's meditations prepare her for a sense of wonder no less than horrific vision. As a result, she sees not only the dead frog but also the "tree with the lights in it … transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). It is a vision that, as Heraclitus would have predicted, comes and goes. It is a vision she lives for. In that moment, her spirit's aspirations and her own reality are confirmed. In Holy the Firm, the fire is the fire that attracts the moth to destruction and the fire that disfigures Julie; but it is also the light that comes into Dillard's spirit and onto her face, as onto the face of every artist, which, "like a seraph's" face, lights "the kingdom of God for the people to see." Heraclitus's imagery of forever waxing and waning fire is the perfect metaphor for her thematic dualities for good and evil, beautiful and grotesque, and repulsive and awesome—all of which coexist in God's nature.

At times, however. Dillard's ritual stalking and ritual preparations to see are undercut by nature's grotesquery. Reading, in particular, is not a sufficient stay against confusion. Dillard discovers that she can get lost in the "labyrinthine tracks of the mind," when she most needs to live in the senses: "So long as I stay in my thoughts … my foot slides" and "I fall" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). In a passage from Teaching a Stone to Talk that echoes the creekside frog episode in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard encounters a resting Guernsey cow during one of her rambles but is shocked to find that it is dead. The cow's insides are gone, "her udder and belly … open and empty." Horrified, Dillard sees that the cow's legs had broken when a limestone sinkhole had suddenly opened under her weight (Teaching a Stone to Talk). Dillard is shocked and disoriented, fearing that the ground will open beneath her and she will fall unchecked. The alternative to falling, to terror, and to doubt, she writes, is to dance. Ritual dance, real or imagined, allows Dillard to quiet morbid intellectualizing, to enter into direct contact with the natural world, and to praise despite the threat of meaninglessness. Dance is her least-mentioned ritual, but it is crucial for keeping her spiritual balance.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, falling and dancing imagery combine as Dillard seeks signs of hope but fears that the monstrous may prevail. Near the book's end, she describes herself as a "sojourner seeking signs" and remembers that Isak Dinesen, brokenhearted, had stepped into the Kenyan morning seeking a sign and had witnessed a rooster tear from its root a chameleon's tongue—the unwelcome sign again of pervasive cruelty. But Dillard's thoughts and feelings about that shocking moment in Dinesen's experience and about cruelty in nature are altered; she is once again "transfigured" as a maple key twirls down toward her on the wind. She becomes aware of that other "wind of the spirit" and thinks, "If I am a maple leaf falling, at least I can twirl." Similarly, in concluding "Sojourner" in Teaching a Stone to Talk, Dillard turns from "thoughts of despair" about purposelessness sensed everywhere, to thoughts about beauty, and she invites us, "with as much spirit as we can muster, [to] go out with a buck and wing." That said, she envisions nature joining in:

The consort of musicians strikes up, and we in the chorus stir and move and start twirling our hats. A Mangrove island turns drift to dance … rocking over the salt sea at random, rocking day and night and round the sun, rocking round the sun and out toward east of Hercules.

Moreover, as she has with stalking and seeing, Dillard locates the dance ritual in the tradition of Judeo-Christian ritual and mysticism. She recalls that King David "leaped and danced naked before the dark of the Lord in a barren desert," a model for herself in the face of spiritual emptiness, and a reminder to us, she says, to "make connections; let rip; and dance whenever you can." She is dancing significantly, as A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ends: "I go my way and my left foot says 'Glory,' and my right foot says 'Amen' in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing to the two silver trumpets of praise."

There are powerful moments in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when Annie Dillard, performing her stalking, seeing, and dancing rituals, has the sudden insight that not only is she stalking but she is being stalked, not only is she seeing but she is being seen, and not only is she dancing but music is being played for her. On the dark side, God is a stalker-hunter, a destroyer, the ultimate "'archer in cover,'" whose arrows bring fear and mortality. Being seen, though, is joyful. In the central mystical moment of the book, when Dillard is taken unaware by the "tree with the lights in it," she exclaims that "it was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance." We do not need to be told who has seen her. And the agent of the dance is more than nature. When Dillard imagines herself spinning through the universe to stop her "sweeping fall," she notices that "Someone" pipes as "we are dancing a tarantella until the sweat pours." Having divined that she is stalked, seen as well as seeing, a dancer to "Someone's" tune, Dillard concludes that she "cannot ask for more than to be so wholly acted upon," even if by a plague of locusts, because she would willingly pay the price in discomfort to be "rapt and enwrapped" in the "real world" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Her imagery of being acted on climaxes as the book ends in passages about ritual sacrifice that, again, combine her personal vision with the Judeo-Christian.

As Dillard debates whether corruption and beauty are equal in creation and concludes that corruption is not "beauty's very heart," she describes herself as "a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar." There she takes a deep breath and opens her eyes, seeing "worms in the horn of the altar," as "a sense of the real exults me; the cords loose; I walk on my way" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). In this mystical moment, she finds freedom in accepting the fallen world. But she needs to go beyond supplication and acceptance to praise, from "please" to "thank you." And she does. The last two chapters of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek focus on sacrificial rituals that Dillard must know are in the Judeo-Christian tradition, rituals of purification and thanksgiving rather than merely propitiating the gods. She concentrates on an ancient Israelite ritual, "the wave breast of thanksgiving," which is—significantly, considering Dillard's joy in being seen—"a catching [of] God's eye." The priest dresses in clean linen, comes to the altar, and is given a consecrated breastbone of a ritually slain ram, which he waves as an offering to the Lord. Dillard knows this ritual of thanksgiving works, and she ends her discussion with a phrase from Catholic liturgy: "Thanks be to God." She then calls on a second part of the ritual to acknowledge her ongoing problem with the cruel, horrible, and monstrous in nature. After the priest waves the breastbone, he "heaves" the ram's shoulder bone. Dillard interprets this to mean that after catching God's eye, one can "speak up for the creation," can protest cruelty and waste in the natural world. "Could I heave a little shred of frog shoulder at the Lord?" she muses, remembering the frog's death she had witnessed at creekside. She finally understands, though, that both the "wave" to capture God's glance and the "heave" to lodge protest are necessary for a unified ritual; "both meant a wide-eyed and keen-eyed thanks," and neither was whole without the other.

As one stalking and being stalked, seeing and being seen, dancing to someone's tune, performing rituals of sacrifice, and serving as victim of the sacrifice, Dillard places herself in a mystical relationship with both a nature and a God who are at once both concealed and revealed. She concludes with prayers of affirmation, no matter how bleak the moment's reality is. In Teaching a Stone to Talk, she notes that "we as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism." We have desacralized nature, she says, and God no longer speaks from the whirlwind. Until "God changes his mind, until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, or until we can teach a stone to talk, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it." Dillard observes: "we are here to witness…. The silence is all there is." Nevertheless, she concludes with an exhortation to prayer: "you take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence…. Pray without ceasing."

The remarkable conclusion to Holy the Firm is, in effect, an extended, unceasing prayer that reveals the God beyond nature who is linked with it by "holy the firm." Here the book's major thematic and artistic elements coalesce. The images of the burning moth, Julie the burned child, and Annie Dillard herself are intertwined with Puget Sound's "islands on fire" and seraphs' and the artists' faces that "can sing only the first 'Holy' before the intensity of their love ignites them again and dissolves them again, perpetually, into flames" (Holy the Firm). Dillard is the artist-nun, aflame with holiness. Dillard's book-prayer is "lighting the kingdom of god for the people to see" (Holy the Firm).

If Dillard's Christian desire to light the kingdom of God marks her apart from other nature writers, it is only a matter of degree. All non-Christian writers I have mentioned, and many more, are fascinated with the relationships between nature, human consciousness, and "mystery." Troubled by the combined intellectual and spiritual consciousness of Newtonian and Cartesian thought, which separated spirit and matter and placed nature beneath humans in importance, by nonteleological, Darwinian natural selection, and by technological assaults on the natural environment, twentieth-century nature writers have explored alternative views. Committed to science as guide, writers as diverse as Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Loren Eiseley, Peter Matthiesen, Barry Lopez, and Ann Zinger have nevertheless kept as their first loyalty and touchstone direct, experiential encounters with nature. All report aesthetic and spiritual rewards for doing so. In Dillard's essays, the same persona speaks to us as from the works of other nature writers—the solitary figure in nature, moved to philosophical speculation and, finally, to awe and wonder, to self-forgetting, and to an affirmation of realities that resist modern and contemporary threats of hopelessness and despair.

Despite such affinities, however, Annie Dillard has a special voice that speaks of balancing the tension between fear and hope, between horror and celebration, through rituals of stalking, seeing, and dancing. In such rituals, she has awakened not only to mystery in nature but to mystery beyond nature. Her Christian obsessions and ritual practice culminate in prayer without cessation. "[I] resound," she writes, "like a beaten bell" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek).