Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard chronicles a year on a creek in Virginia Thoreau-style, discussing life, the universe, and everything (literally) and making a veiled poetic exploration of the relationship between Christianity and the world. She offers no more than brief glimpses of herself, preferring to open up channels of thought to this present circumscribed life in the woods.

Dillard writes in a cascade of complex metaphor, drawing image upon image in oscillating rhythm. At times her breathless enthusiasm is like a nine-year-old’s, spewing facts as she does in boundless joy at knowledge of the natural world (lest this sound like criticism, I gladly admit to doing the same. The nature study class I took this summer offered me endless material to work with). The book is largely observation—observation of the specific life she encounters, and observation of the general nature of life itself. Dillard describes the latent brilliance of nature when she descries a muskrat in her creek: “It changed its course, veered toward the bank, and disappeared behind an indentation in the rushy shoreline. I felt a rush of such pure energy I thought I would not need to breathe for days. . . . The great hurrah about wild animals is that they exist at all, and the greater hurrah is the actual moment of seeing them” (192).

She makes a startling reflection on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: “Most of us are still living in the universe of Newtonian physics, and fondly imaging that real, hard scientists have no use for these misty ramblings, dealing as scientists do with the measurable and the known. . . . But in 1927 Werner Heisenberg pulled out the rug, and our whole understanding of the universe toppled and collapsed. For some reason it has not yet trickled down to the man on the street that some physicists now are a bunch of wild-eyed, raving mystics” (202). The principle states that a given particle’s velocity and position cannot be predicted.

This means that single electron’s path cannot be determined for sure; either velocity or position can be calculated, but never can both be figured out at the same time. And this means that determinism, down to the atomic level, is impossible. As Dillard writes regarding the abundance of parasitic insects, “These things are not well enough known” (229).