Summary Of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

1417 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Nature and poetry

In Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, there are fifteen individual chapters that talk about different topics. Dillard is not a curious natural observer, but an ecological hunter who connects philosophy and nature. She walks into nature, senses the wind and the ground, and communicates with plants and animals, like she is a part of nature. She feels that by viewing natural landscapes in Tinker Creek, then humans’ metal state can be purified by experiencing these views, because humans are complicated. By getting in touch with nature and investigating the relationships between humans and nature, Dillard accomplishes her pilgrimage. According to Dillard’s words, people cannot predict all natural phenomena by rules which are concluded by experience, …show more content…

The nature described by Annie Dillard is consistent, but also diversified; it is orderly, but also disordered; it is sublime, but also ruined. Dillard writes about the horror of reproduction, the cheapness of life and the destiny of death. Nature becomes empty, which also makes people’s mind becomes empty, along with the coming of fall, the withering of trees, and the deaths of everything. In the beginning of chapter 8, “Intricacy”, Dillard drags the topic to the complexity of nature by writing “a rosy complex light”. Based on her ecological knowledge and examples, “Evolution, of course, if the vehicle of intricacy.” (Page 133) She explains that natural view itself is a complex structure, which means all existing complex objects are grouping together in the specific space and time. Where the life goes, where the complexity and chaos appears. In the following chapter “Fecundity”, Dillard describes the horrible scenes in her dream about two luna moths mating and the eggs hatching. This dream frightens her, and her own shouting wakes her up. “ I don’t know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I supposed it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.” (Page 162) Previously, …show more content…

When we seeing this world in a positive attitude, every simple detail can be pure and beautiful. It can help us maintain our purity and discover more beauties of nature. In this way, we are able to enjoy and experience the amazement of every tiny thing happens around us. However, only being positive may lead people into a wrong position that think everything around us is good and pure. Oppositely, when we using the negative attitude to face everything, even a simple action, like luna moth eggs hatch, can be horrible. Although it may not be as good as it is in positive way, it actually leads us to understand the true meaning of everything that happened. Whereas, only being negative will make us miss many beautiful moments. There is nothing absolute pure or absolute horrible. Almost everything happens around us is two-sided which means seeing in one way can only understand parts of it. If we want to fully know something, standing in two different ways will help a

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of The Death Of A Moth By Annie Dillard

    1353 Words  | 3 Pages

    Early in the essay, she describes herself living alone with her two cats, and she, somehow, makes joke with them although it was not so sure how often she did that in a day. There we can see that she is solitary, yet has some sense of humor lies in herself. Revealing her living environment, that would signal the reader about the upcoming adventure of her with the moths. Some may question why Dillard chose Moths instead of other interesting bugs like a caterpillar or flies to relate to human life. Plus, she does not only explain how the moths dies, but also provides a vivid detail of them dying so that the reader to

    Read More

  • Audubon and Dillard

    447 Words  | 1 Pages

    Annie Dillard portrays her thoughts differently in her passage, incorporating a poetic sense that is carried through out the entire passage. Dillard describes the birds she is viewing as “transparent” and that they seem to be “whirling like smoke”. Already one could identify that Dillard’s passage has more of poetic feel over a scientific feel. This poetic feeling carries through the entire passage, displaying Dillard’s total awe of these birds. She also incorporates word choices such as “unravel” and that he birds seem to be “lengthening in curves” like a “loosened skein”. Dillard’s word choice implies that he is incorporating a theme of sewing. As she describes these birds she seems to be in awe and by using a comparison of sewing she is reaching deeper inside herself to create her emotions at the time.

    Read More

  • The Fifth Rule Character Analysis

    854 Words  | 2 Pages

    Award-winning author Mandy Hale once stated, “Without negativity, life would be amazing.” However, this statement does not always prove to be true. Today’s modern community generates a judgement that negative experiences will ruin your life, but studies show that negativity can actually result in positive change. For example, negativity can positively change teenagers actions, introduce teenager’s to more supportive environments, and help fix broken relationships.

    Read More

  • Essay On Owl By Mary Oliver

    720 Words  | 2 Pages

    Mary Oliver’s unique responses to the owls illustrate the complexity of nature by displaying its two sides. Mary Oliver at first enjoys owls and all they have to offer, yet she later emphasizes her fear of a similar animal. The visual imagery she uses in her descriptions

    Read More

  • Comparing Woolf's Death Of The Moth And Dillard '

    913 Words  | 2 Pages

    While Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” and Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels” both use animals as a symbol of life to share their viewpoint of life, Woolf uses sad and sympathetic tone and usual description of a typical autumn morning and Dillard uses cheerful and positive tone and almost dreamlike description of a beautiful summer evening to convey that people should live their lives the way they choose, since death is inevitable anyway.

    Read More

  • Compare Five A. M. And Five Flights Up

    1370 Words  | 3 Pages

    The speaker in “Five A.M.” looks to nature as a source of beauty during his early morning walk, and after clearing his mind and processing his thoughts along the journey, he begins his return home feeling as though he is ready to begin the “uphill curve” (ln. 14) in order to process his daily struggles. However, while the speaker in “Five Flights Up,” shares the same struggles as her fellow speaker, she does little to involve herself in nature other than to observe it from the safety of her place of residence. Although suffering as a result of her struggles, the speaker does little to want to help herself out of her situation, instead choosing to believe that she cannot hardly bare recovery or to lift the shroud of night that has fallen over her. Both speakers face a journey ahead of them whether it be “the uphill curve where a thicket spills with birds every spring” (ln. 14-15) or the five flights of stares ahead of them, yet it is in their attitude where these two individuals differ. Through the appreciation of his early morning surroundings, the speaker in “Five A.M.” finds solitude and self-fulfillment, whereas the speaker in “Five Flights Up” has still failed to realize her own role in that of her recovery from this dark time in her life and how nature can serve a beneficial role in relieving her of her

    Read More

  • Inscription For The Entrance To A Wood By William Cullen Bryant

    528 Words  | 2 Pages

    In nature, someone can hear the sounds of a creek flowing and birds chirping and insects buzzing; in civilization, someone can hear engines roaring, people chattering, and buildings being built. In nature, one feels happiness and contentment; in civilization, one feels guilt and misery and sorrow. These simplicities of nature are what appeals to William Cullen Bryant in the poem ‘Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood’. The poem tells the reader that nature is a happier place than civilization and that nature gives one the answers to their existence and problems of life that civilization created. Civilization is ugly and corrupt while nature is beauty and tranquility.

    Read More

  • Cathedral By John Dillard Analysis

    1025 Words  | 3 Pages

    The significance of the book Dillard is reading, when the moth burns is when Rimbaud “burnt out his brain”—yet what remains in a “a thousand poems.” Also shows when the Monks lit themselves on

    Read More

  • Lewis Thomas On Societies As Organisms

    836 Words  | 2 Pages

    From the beginning, the researchers’ crowd is described as a mass of insects, “[swarming]” and creating a “vibrating, ionic movement” (232). The use of visual and kinetic imagery ingeniously inspires the readers and immediately sets up the principal analogy of humans acting like social insects in an organism. Likewise, the “blackening” of the soil by “[fumbling] and [shoving]” ants as they collaboratively build the nest enhances the text by increasing the reader’s interest (233). Moreover, the termite nest’s “architecture” may impress some readers, as the enthusiastic author glorifies the “artists” that erect “beautiful, curving, symmetrical arches” of the nest (234). The comparison of mankind with insects then seems obvious (or acceptable for unwilling readers), since similes successfully picture appealing images in our brain of the organism’s impressive effectiveness.

    Read More

  • Having A Positive Outlook In 'Dear Miss Breed'

    1580 Words  | 4 Pages

    This shows that positive thinking can get in the way of all your hopes and dreams. You may have an image of a life that seems perfect, but you need to be able to separate that from reality and not get the two mixed. It sometimes blinds you from the true reality. Also in the same text, it stated ‘’the pressure of positive thinking can result in suppressing any pessimistic thoughts or unpleasant emotions because they might attract bad things. You deprive yourself of access to the complete picture and the full range of emotions.

    Read More

  • Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

    3006 Words  | 7 Pages

    Annie Dillard opens Pilgrim at Tinker Creek mysteriously, hinting at an unnamed presence. She toys with the longstanding epic images of battlefields and oracles, injecting an air of holiness and awe into the otherwise ordinary. In language more poetic than prosaic, she sings the beautiful into the mundane. She deifies common and trivial findings. She extracts the most high language from all the possible permutations of words to elevate and exalt the normal. Under her pen, her literary devices and her metaphors, a backyard stream becomes a shrine. Writing a prayer, Dillard becomes an instrument through which a ubiquitous spirit reveals itself. Yet in other cases, she latches on to an image of holiness and makes it ugly, horrifying, disturbing, as if to suggest that the manifestation of all that is holy need not always be pretty, that the gorgeous and the gruesome together comprise all that is holy, and without one the other would be meaningless. The written words are a spiritual pilgrimage to the holy shrine where language tinkers with itself, makes a music unto itself, chips and shapes itself into the stuff of Dillard's essays.

    Read More

  • Death Of The Moth Rhetorical Analysis

    1636 Words  | 4 Pages

    She describes the September morning as “mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than the summer months.” She then goes on to describe the field outside her window, using word choice that is quite the opposite of words that would be used to describe a depressing story. She depicts the exact opposite of death, and creates a feeling of joy, happiness, and life to the world outside her room. After this, she goes into great detail about the “festivities” of the rooks among the treetops, and how they “soared round the treetops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air”. There is so much going on around her that “it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the book.” Descriptions like these are no way to describe a seemingly depressing story about a moth, but by using these, joyful descriptions, Woolf connects everything happening outside to a single strand of energy. These images set a lively tone for the world around her, and now allow her to further introduce the moth into the story.

    Read More

  • Symbolism In Fahrenheit 451

    506 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, there are many themes, symbols, and motifs that are found throughout the novel. For my journal response, I have chosen to discuss nature as a prevalent symbol in the book. The main character, Montag, lives in a society where technology is overwhelmingly popular, and nature is regarded as an unpredictable variable that should be avoided. Technology is used to repress the citizens, but the oppression is disguised as entertainment, like the TV parlour. On the opposite end of the spectrum, nature is viewed as boring and dull, but it is a way to escape the brainwashing that technology brings. People who enjoy nature are deemed insane and are forced to go into therapy. Clarisse says “My psychiatrist wants to know why I go out and hike around in the forests and watch the birds and collect butterflies,” (Bradbury 23) which shows she is a threat to the control that the government has put upon the people by enjoying nature.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Death Of A Moth By Annie Dillard

    695 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the opening line of the essay, Dillard writes, “I live on northern Puget Sound, in Washington State, alone” (1). The author rejects a normal sentence structure in order to isolate the world “alone.” This is used to bring to attention the reoccurring theme of being alone that contributes to Dillard’s argument of the sacrifice of being a writer. Another interesting syntax choice the author uses is through run-on sentences. When Dillard first notices the moths in the bathroom, she describes, “And the moths, the empty moths, stagger against each other, headless, in a confusion of arcing strips of chitin like peeling varnish, like a jumble of buttresses for cathedral vaults, like nothing resembling moths, so that I would hesitate to call them moths, except that I had some experience with the figure Moth reduced to a nub” (4). By utilizing commas, the author shows her train of thought that lead her mind to recall the pivotal moth in the essay. It helps the reader understand and transition to a time-jump in the writing. Dillard later connects run-on sentences with a semicolon, “So I read, lost, every day sitting by my tent, while warblers swung in the leaves overhead and bristle worms trailed their inches over the twiggy dirt at my feet; and I read every night by candlelight, while barred owls called in the forest and pale moths massed around my head in the clearing, where my light made a ring”

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis: Kew Gardens

    1205 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...that suspends the boundaries of man and nature, the way in which she structures the last image to be one of hostility indicates the unsustainable nature of the garden.

    Read More

More about Summary Of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

Open Document