280 pages
Published 1974
Read from March 13 to March 28
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Classics of nature writing are haunted by the outlines of everything we’ve destroyed.
In the fifty years since Pilgrim was published, we’ve lost uncountable numbers of birds; insect populations have been in free fall; amphibians have collapsed. The very soil has become sterile, quenched by herbicides and pesticides. Where Dillard pondered the vastness of divinity and the cruel beauty of nature under troublesome clouds of starlings, you might be lucky to see a scatter of sparrows today. Most of Tinker Creek itself, Dillard’s “one great giver,” today seems a ghost watershed, squeezed between the culs-de-sac and fulfillment centers that sprawl out from Roanoke and the I-81 corridor.
The spirit of intellectual Christianity lurking throughout this book is also pretty much extinct. At least it is in America, where the loudest elements of the faith champion a skin-deep literalism, fully commercialized and dead inside. Atheism and Christlike Christianity alike are capable of transcendence, the ecstatic revelations of humility before the infinite; the greatest exaltation an American evangelist can know is browbeating a waitress on a Sunday afternoon.
At its heart, Pilgrim is a book-length consideration of the cruelty within nature’s beauty, a rumination on how any conception of a creator god must incorporate the blood-spill as well as the birdsong, the parasite alongside the petals:
For if God is in one sense the igniter, a fireball that spins over the ground of continents, God is also the destroyer, lightning, blind power, impartial as the atmosphere.
From an atheist’s point of view, of course, the matter is much clearer, though no less awe-making. We are intelligent animals reliant on our deeply enmeshed social bonds; beauty (or rather the appreciation of it) is the newcomer, yet vital to us nonetheless, as vital as the sometimes bloody workings of mere survival. We are part of nature, inseparable, and that is glory.
I can respect intellectual Christianity, but it has died back faster than the insects have, these last fifty years. In contrast to either atheism or intellectual Christianity, contemporary evangelicalism presents a pop-up picture book understanding of the world, a paper cutout universe merely six thousand years deep, reducing us all to children play-acting for our abusive sky-dad’s jollies. Animals, plants, nature as a whole — all of it recedes into the background art from a Dick & Jane book. I can only imagine how many contemporary Southern Baptists in Dillard’s western Virginia would decry her spiritual masterpiece as evolutionist sacrilege.
I’m pretty sure Robert Macfarlane name-dropped this book in one or more of his tributes to the titans of nature writing past. It’s more than worthy of such notice. Every line jolts or shimmers with the mystery of language, scintillating or concealing in intricate patterns like cloud-shadow tumbling ahead of the wind. At least once a page, this book takes my breath away:
Some trees sink taproots to rock; some spread wide mats of roots clutching at acres. They will not be blown. We run around under these obelisk-creatures, teetering on our soft, small feet. We are out on a jaunt, picnicking, fattening like puppies for our deaths. Shall I carve a name on this trunk? What if I fell in a forest: Would a tree hear?
Like the best nature writing, Pilgrim is about learning to see; and, having seen, sensing how much else exists beyond our awareness. The present is elusive, recursive, a revelation quickly lost in other stimulation. I’m reminded of The Anthropology of Turquoise or A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A magnificent book.
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