Green Group discussion

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is Annie Dillard's "signature" book, but the short essay collection in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters contains the same sense of wonder. Dillard has a deep sense of what is "holy", and she can find that holiness in both the small and huge parts of the world.

The first essay, "Total Eclipse", leaves me breathless. Dillard's awareness of the "holy" includes the mysterium tremendum cited by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy. She knows that holiness requires us to accept dread along with awe. She says:

"The white ring and the saturated darkness made the earth and sky look as they must look in the memories of the careless dead. What I saw, what I seemed to be standing in, was all the wrecked light that the memories of the dead could shed upon the living world."

The second essay, "An Expedition to the Pole", challenges the reader, since Dillard is connecting the ignorance of early polar explorers with the framework of the church. Both lack a real awareness of the ineffable Power for which they reach, whether the Pole or God.

One of the key essays is the third one, "Living Like Weasels." She writes: "The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity an dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should." Her intensity burns brightly in this small essay.

The fourth essay, "In the Jungle", made me wish I had the courage to truly experience the Napo River in Ecuador as Dillard does. I wish I could be so fearless; she says, "We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place."

The title essay is the sixth; in it, Dillard deals more directly with her faith. She says, "We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop grove, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it....And that is why I went to the Galapagos Islands."

In a later essay, "Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos", she adds the details of that trip, and the poet in her quotes Coleridge as she says: "I will sing you the Galapagos islands, the sea lions soft on the rocks...I could go back, or I could go on; or I could sit down like
Kubla Khan:

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

There are 14 essays in all--and Dillard's intricate, descriptive prose illuminates all of them. These words speak of her in such a true way for me:

http://www.earthlight.org/earthsaint2...

"I am no scientist," she says of herself. "I am a wanderer with a background in theology and a penchant for quirky facts." She adds, "As a thinker I keep discovering that beauty itself is as much a fact, and a mystery...I consider nature's facts -- its beautiful and grotesque forms and events -- in terms of the import to thought and their impetus to the spirit. In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy."

Environmentalists have compared Dillard to Thoreau, Dickinson, and Emerson. Edward Abbey wrote this about Teaching a Stone to Talk: "This little book is haloed and informed throughout by Dillard's distinctive passion and intensity, a sort of intellectual radiance that reminds me of both Thoreau and Emily Dickinson." Loren Eiseley, reviewing Tickets for a Prayer Wheel: Poems, says this about her: "She loves the country below. Like Emerson, she sees the virulence in nature as well as the beauty that entrances her. Annie Dillard is a poet."

Thanks for adding this Julia. You've intrigued me with your wonderful summaries of the individual essays. I hope I can get to it this summer--I'm moderating a reading discussion in a different group for Aug/Sept. I have added it to my reading list though. Thanks again.

Thanks for the wonderful summary! I know that I've read one of Dillard's essays, but it was moons and moons ago.

Now, I will definitely have to look it up and read some of the others.

Thanks to both of you--Dillard is not an easy read, since she thinks and writes in such an intricate way.

I love that Pilgrim at Tinker Creek can be read online for free; Chapter 8 is called "Intricacy" and is my favorite. You can read just that chapter at http://www.scribd.com/doc/80450015/Pi...

She bombards the reader with example after example of the wondrous interweavings of life, and then says, near the end:

"Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The surface of mystery is not smooth, any more than the planet is smooth; not even a single hydrogen atom is smooth, let alone a pine. Nor does it fit together; not even the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules are a perfect match, for, even after the atom of iron replaces the magnesium, long streamers of disparate atoms trail disjointedly from the rims of the molecules’ loops. Freedom cuts both ways. Mystery itself is as fringed and intricate as the shape of the air in time. Forays into mystery cut bays and fine fiords, but the forested mainland itself is implacable both in its bulk and in its most filigreed fringe of detail."

I'm very careful NOT to dive into reading Annie Dillard unless I have at least a good, solid hour with no distractions--she is a force of nature, with her whirlwind mind and words.

“Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.”
Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters