A NEW EXISTENTIAL VOICE

...Dillard watches the world of nature seriously because ultimately it reflects the rich complexity of human experience...

...She troubles those readers, however, who prefer to interpret her acceptance of the vital tension of existence as the triumph of oversimplification, nostalgia and phony piety...

...During her evenings at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard read avariciously, and she comments at length on Marius Von Senden's Space and Sight...

...As her narrative develops, Dillard grows comfortable with ambiguity, accepting the senseless ways of nature while scrupulously describing it...

...The confusion for many readers lies in their misconception that Annie Dillard's terms of existence are mutually exclusive: while believing that one has the choice to accept the world willingly for both its beauty and savagery, she simultaneously claims that there is much about the world that allows no choice...

...Dillard witnesses to the existential condition as nature reveals it, begging us to see it with her, for freedom to Annie Dillard lies in acute awareness of the terms of life...

...She insists that each person has his own creative capacity to awaken from blindness to a state of perception that discovers the world with new meaning...

...The creels-Tinker and Carven's-are an active mystery, fresh every minute...

...Although the "anchor-hold" at Tinker Creek reminds one inevitably of Walden Pond, Dillard is closer to Melville than to Thoreau...

...Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water...

...While readers and reviewers of Pilgrim, even those in "fundamental disagreement," appreciate Dillard's poetic descriptions of her natural world, they generally question how she is able to celebrate an existence which is often senseless and chaotic to her...

...The goal of Dillard's work is to make the reader see, to hold his eyes open "with toothpicks, with trees...

...The future is the light on the water...

...Mystery...

...His skin emptied and dropped...

...Some do learn to see, especially the young ones...

...It is impossible, moreover, to abstract a statement from Dillard that involves the pursuit of Utopian or reformist goals...

...We must somehow take a wider view," she urges, "look at the whole landscape, really see it and describe what's going on here...

...In the first chapter, "Heaven and Earth in Jest," Dillard remarks that Tinker Creek is a good place to live because "there's a lot to think about...

...Her awareness of both light and darkness is profound...

...Living with nature, then, provides Dillard neither escape from life, nor therapy to return to life, nor programs designed to improve the status quo...

...I never merited this grace, that when I face upstream I see the light on the water careening toward me, inevitable, freely...

...times," while Hayden Carruth has called Pilgrim a "dangerous book, literally a subversive book, in spite of its attractions...

...Fidelity to horrible detail makes her celebration of life startling, for her style is so careful of the minute that her theme, in comparison, borders on the irrational...

...Then at least we can wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise...

...For Annie Dillard, it is significant to feel nature profoundly, for then she is close to asking the ultimate question about being, and, for her, to do this is everything...

...The frog I saw as being sucked by a giant water bug...

...I couldn't catch my breath...

...in the profoundest way, she often cries out, "My God, what a world...

...The creek itself becomes, for example, the Incarnation: "I looked up the creek and here it comes, the future being borne aloft as on a winding succession of laden trays...

...To some readers, Dillard's celebration is a pious acceptance of the world simply because God made it...

...Her courage is revealed in her daring openness toward nature, the dramatic terms by which she recognizes the Divine...

...She desires to nourish and protect the holy land, not simply as an ecologist, but as a wonder-struck pilgrim-poet who honors life as a place where "mystery bumps against mystery," where one must search and strive continually to understand existence...

...she responds strongly and thinks deeply about the case studies reported in this book...

...The dialogue will long continue, for Annie Dillard did not begin it...

...There is no accounting for one second of it...

...her message, simply and totally, is to honor creation and the mystical revelation of God in creation...

...By insisting that human beings have the visionary capacity to see both the beauty and the violence of the world with new eyes, Dillard is different from the traditional Transcendentalist...

...Pilgrim at Tinker Creek owes its high distinction, however, neither to the Pulitzer Prize nor to a "dangerous" reputation, for Annie Dillard indeed takes evil very seriously...

...no more and no less...

...Her view is "essentially passive, not to say evasive" (Carruth...

...She is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer, stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names on taking hold of it, and then as the tree with the lights in it.' It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years...

...In a letter to me, Annie Dillard wrote: "Art is my interest, mysticism my message, Christian mysticism...

...his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent...

...The paradise of Emerson as Transcendentalist, on the other hand, is a transfigured world, redesigned by the soul in touch with nature who creates an order analogous to that of nature: "So fast will all disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, madhouses, prisons, enemies, vanish...

...For Dillard, the world is an epiphany, and the woodlands and waterfalls of Tinker Creek are to be neither ignored nor escaped...

...It is, by definition, Christmas, the incarnation...

...While the tree with the lights in it is the epiphany which controls beautiful moments available to anyone open to them, an equally vivid image-that of a giant water bug destroying a frog-controls patterns of violence...

...for others, her book has "little reference to life on this planet at this moment...

...It is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end...

...Rather, Dillard's experience draws her more deeply into the mystery of the human condition, and she reveres it...

...A NEW EXISTENTIAL VOICE ELEANOR B. WYMARD For Annie Dillard the world is an epiphany Although Annie Dillard was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper's Magazine Press, 1974, $8.95), a critic of the stature of Eudora Welty has admitted, "I honestly don't know what she is talking about at...

...By surrendering to mystery, Dillard accepts the actual world, even though it remains rationally incomprehensible to her...

...The creek as Incarnation is a jolting metaphor which disrupts any stereotyped vision...

...The problem of celebrating existence lies not in the world, but in man's failure to see with eyes that transfigure...

...Dillard is exploring, in truth, not merely the woodland of Tinker Creek, but, more profoundly, what it means to be a believer in God...

...restructuring the universe is not for her...

...A pilgrim, not a traveler, Dillard meditates on the opacity of existence as revealed in the turbulent dichotomy of woodland life...

...She does not intend her hermitage at Tinker Creek to stand as a political statement nor to inspire ethical behavior or social reform...

...As readers of Pilgrim know, Dillard uses two major metaphors to reflect her concept that beauty and violence are equal parts of the mystery of creation...

...eleanor B. wymard is an associate professor of English at Carlow College in Pittsburgh...

...If she has a mission, it is purely that of the Christian artist: to offer new insight into human existence...

...In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Annie Dillard reconciles the creative imagination and Christian faith in the Incarnation...

...Freedom, for Annie Dillard, lies in choosing the world, not out of pious or pietistic sentimentality, but out of acceptance of one's task to make the world more human by becoming more fully human oneself...

...The pilgrim finds what she seeks...

...Although she does not grow to love the Furies more, she accepts their presence...

...Her mysticism does not bring her to a vision of another world-de contemptu mundi-but rather to a new dimension of life where Tinker Creek becomes a holy land of miracles and demons...

...How can one be a believer while portraying honestly the chaotic ways of nature...

...By forcing the reader to break through cliches, Dillard urges fresh insight into common experiences, for without the "unself-con-scious" perception of this pilgrim-poet, even the turbulence of Tinker Creek would have lain dormant...

...One of her deepest perceptions, in fact, is that modern living robs human beings of the capacity to sense good and evil...

...A little girl [once blind, who sees for the first time] visits a garden...

...Dillard's focus is not so narrow...

...The fifteen chapters of this prose narrative cover the four seasons of 1972 when Annie Dillard explored a a woods, a waterfall, and a seventeen-foot-wide creek which circle her home in the Roanoke Valley of Virginia...

...But in an age of disbelief, it is refreshing that the quarrel can even be rekindled...

...This apparent contradiction is actually paradox...

...they are temporary and shall be no more" (Nature...

...The creek is the one great river...