Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Critical Essays

Dillard is keenly aware of the opposites in creation—beauty and ugliness, bliss and terror. The beauty, grace, and perfect, careless spontaneity of a mockingbird as it plunges in a straight vertical descent from a four-story building impresses her deeply, but it is the grotesque phenomena in creation, such as the frog being sucked by the water bug, which prompt her more persistent and darker speculations. The questions “What’s it all about?” and “What is going on here?” run like a leitmotif throughout the book. They are asked particularly in regard to the insect world, which boasts such a wide variety of puzzling behaviors, from the habit of the female praying mantis of devouring the male as they copulate to the female lacewing’s eating of her own eggs. Dillard muses over the world as a parasitic place in which everything is battered, torn, preyed upon, and devoured. The world does not fit together in a way that makes rational sense; it offers testimony only to the Creator’s exuberance, not to His goodness, or even to His intelligence.

Yet at other times Dillard’s vision extends beyond the problematic aspects of Creation. During moments of heightened perception, she sees the world in a wholly different way, pulsing with divine fire and light. Moments such as these are also a recurring motif, and they act as a counterpoint to the insistent questioning. Indeed, the entire book can be understood as a prolonged meditation on how to see.

Normally, people see only what they have been conditioned to expect; the human brain acts as an editor without the conscious permission of the mind. Dillard draws on her reading of a book about how people who had been blind from birth reacted when their sight was restored. One girl, speechless with wonder before a tree, eventually described it as “the tree with the lights in it.” This image gives Dillard one of her central, informing ideas. She describes how she had searched for the tree with the lights in it for many years, through all seasons. One day, out walking and thinking of nothing in particular, she saw a cedar “charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame.” The grass below her feet was seemingly on fire also, and charged with light. It was an epiphany, a manifestation, such as Moses had received through the burning bush, of a spirit and a power, burning in fire and light, which makes all things new. Dillard felt not only that she was seeing for the first time but that she too was being seen. The moment passed, but she lives for its recurrence; it is the moment which renders all other moments in life, and all other enterprises, inconsequential.

In this connection, Dillard makes...