Up the Creek

...or startles a grasshopper by yelling, "Boo...

...At the outset she explains, "I propose to keep here what Thoreau called 'a meteorological journal of the mind,' telling some tales and describing some of the sights of some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead...

...I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering and, like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt'ring eye and say, 'Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are 228 separate muscles?' The poor wretch flees...

...I am not making chatter...

...Swedish meatballs...

...Still, there is enough fun and good will in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that I cannot dismiss it altogether...

...Fish gotta swim," she notes, "and birds gotta fly...

...If this doesn't happen to you, folks, you lack heightened awareness...

...Dillard's parting shot, "Spend the afternoon...

...Her style simply gets away from her...

...She observes, for example, that female stylops parasitize their victims by absorption through the skin of the abdomen, and she comments that "the sex life of a stylops is equally degenerate...

...After all, who would not appreciate her sense of humor as she scatters black steers with the cries, "Lightning...

...with respect both to its place in nature and to its place among fellow humans...

...Wilson (of cloud chamber fame), Pascal, and Xerxes...

...But if Annie Dillard wants to change lives, she had better talk sense or breath spiritual fire...

...As for luna moths, not only do they mate with the male "on top of the female, hunching repeatedly with a horrible animal vigor," but one night they flew into the author's dreams as if toward a hypnotic fire, leaving her to wake by her own "foreign cry...

...It was small pleasures like these that got me through the self-conscious and silly stuff in this otherwise tedious book...

...Mere metaphors...

...Who would deny her kindness in leaving a bath towel draped over her tub "so that the big, haired spiders, who are constantly getting trapped by the tub's smooth sides, can use its rough surface as an exit ramp...

...Now I must confess that I, too, enjoy moments beside creek and pond, and I, too, have seen and thought things which have changed my life...

...Dillard also gets upset because she cannot make a single elm leaf, while a full-grown elm tree can produce as many as six million leaves in a season...

...Too bad...

...Yet notwithstanding Dillard's loud chatter to the contrary, she only demonstrates once again how terribly self-centered the species can be...

...Ah, she has moved from the city to the country...

...She is as astounded that the Creation did not go as her own imagination and courage would have had it, limiting the universe to "a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball...

...She will observe, learn and share with us????but here the similarity with Thoreau ends...

...Call this book a meteorological journal of an egomaniac...

...But Dillard isn't really so naive...

...Her nature observations also rely heavily on others: Edwin Way Teale, Stephan Graham, Rutherford Piatt, William H. Amos, Paul Er-rington, Will Barker, not to mention numerous quotations whose sources are not named...

...amounts to self-congratulation (she spends the afternoon...

...Elsewhere she joins forces with Jacob, Einstein, C.T.R...

...I fear not...

...Whether they do or don't, the author has bad dreams...

...For her observations are typically described in overstatement reaching toward hysteria, and the lessons she would impart are at best soph-omoric, at worst pompous twaddle...

...Amazingly enough, however, there is not one genuine ecological concern voiced in the entire book...

...Holden Caufield wanted to call a favorite author on the telephone...

...Indeed, there are lives on the planet worth changing, and a nonanthropo-morphic vision of a horizontally defined "chain-of-being" might serve our haughty species well...

...insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another...

...because our age is crying out for a Thoreau?someone with a vision that would reunite man with the natural environment and get us off the macadam to possible extinction, a vision that would seriously reevaluate the epistemological assumptions of all the great powers on the globe...

...Reviewed by Charles Deemer Playwright, short-story writer If Annie Dillard had not spelled out what she was up to in this book, I don't think I would have guessed...

...Dillard puts it this way: "I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly...

...If that is not something Thoreau, or others, would agree with, at least it suggests a level of intelligence absent in most of the book...

...And so Dillard can dash off, "If only Aeschylus and I could convince you that the ichneumon is really and truly as alive as we are...

...Copperhead...

...Her Walden Pond is a stream in a valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia...

...I mean to change his life...

...wrapped in a familiar easy mysticism...

...And when she looks at a sycamore tree: "All the blood in my body crashes to my feet and instantly heaves to my head, so I blind and blush, as a tree blasts into leaf spouting water hurled up from roots...

...The focus is on the silly notion that insects and plants should behave like people...

...I would like to watch Annie Dillard at a gathering of friends and find out whether her strange idiosyncratic squeamishness about the natural universe is as severe, despite occasional moments of light-hearted-ness, as it appears to be...

...Late in the book she notes that "we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world...