This vertiginous hunger for perspective is one of the many things that makes Pilgrim at Tinker Creek such a perennially satisfying reading experience. “Never lose a holy curiosity,” Einstein said and so I lift my microscope down from the shelf, spread a drop of duck pond on a glass slide, and try to look spring in the eye. Somewhere, I can’t find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” “No,” said the priest, “not if you did not know.” “Then why,” asked the Eskimo earnestly, “did you tell me?” If I did not know about the rotifers and paramecia, and all the bloom of plankton clogging the dying pond, fine but since I’ve seen it, I must somehow deal with it, take it into account. Like any sensible person, she finds these glimpses into that universe deeply, almost physically unsettling, but out of a sheer sense of wonder, she makes herself do it anyway: In fact, sometimes quite literally in every square inch, as in the nifty moment when she takes a cup of duck-pond water (which looks “like seething broth”) and puts it under a microscope to see all the tiny creatures living in that universe.

In these pages – part memoir, part natural history, part crackpot seat-of-the-pants philosophy – she muses on the natural world of her surroundings in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, an infernal region infested with biting blackflies and countless slithering poisonous vipers, but a region in which she nevertheless manages to find beauty and even poetry in almost every square inch.

Our book today is one of those modern classics every reader should read: Annie Dillard’s great Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1975.

Pilgrim at tinker creek review