I’ve been discussing with writer friends about our favorite books and authors. We agree on a few, but we all selected different favorites. One of mine is Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
Today’s blog isn’t covered with my reasons for loving her writing—though I could write and write and write about her rhythm, flow, choice of words, scenes, and poetic pace. Instead, I’ll include her words.
Read them.
Reflect on them.
And imagine a creek nearby you often ignore. Stop there and stay a while.
“Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”
“The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.”
“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”
