Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

This stands apart from most other memoirs I’ve read—Dillard isn’t just detailing her experience, as though that were enough to make a meaningful read. The experiences matter, obviously, but this book is at its best when she slows nearly to a stop—observing with breathless stillness, her mind lingering and pressing deeper, so that a moment with a cedar tree or a muskrat or a praying mantis becomes something larger, more complex, more profound. It’s really the combination of memoir, nature journal, spiritual meditation and philosophical essay that makes the book work for me. I’m never going to be interested in yet another alone-in-the-beauty-of-nature memoir, and at the same time this is something richer than spiritual or philosophical rumination. Dillard’s meditations are deeply rooted. They exist in time, and even more so in place. They grow from exquisitely detailed observation, from intimate awareness. Further, she has a real ability to sit with the world, to give it the kind of sustained attention that has always been really rare, but that returns so much value. I loved her concept of seeing as a pearl that “may be found, [but] may not be sought.” Or again later, “You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.” She doesn’t make mindfulness sound easy, by any means, but she makes it look intensely rewarding. I don’t want to just gush, though—it’s not as though nothing bothered me about the book. There are times—lots of times—when the prose just sounds so heavily worked, so wrought that I couldn’t bear it. “The past inserts a finger into a slit in the skin of the present, and pulls.” Really? She allows herself to run with her ideas, and there were moments when she might have reined it in a bit. Then too, and more significantly, as much as I appreciate her approach to the natural world, I was also persistently aware of the immense privilege that underlay it. The ability to sit so patiently, so consistently over time, with so much solitude and so little real want—that isn’t an experience most people ever have access to, no matter how much they might appreciate it or benefit from it. She doesn’t waste it, I’ll grant, but neither does she ever express any awareness of it. In the end, I’m able to overlook those qualms, because the book has so much else to offer. There is an intimacy, a vulnerable receptivity, and a substantive beauty in this book that I do not take for granted.