#04: Pilgrim

Meditations on Annie Dillard's Tinker Creek

I’ve spent the past five weeks away from Stockholm. First Italy, then New York—where I began writing this post in my hotel room on the twentieth floor.

Accompanying me on both of these trips was Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I bought it at a second-hand bookstore in New York last October. My copy is from 1975, and you can tell: it’s browned, musty, and as of three weeks ago, missing its front cover. The back’s days are numbered, too.

1975 is the year after Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was first published. It’s also the year the book won Dillard the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction at 29, making her the youngest woman ever to win the category. Not bad for her first work of prose.

Tinker Creek is part nature writing, part philosophical meditation. Its fifteen chapters are inspired by some twenty journals Dillard kept in the early seventies to record her daily solo walks around a valley in deep, rural Virginia. It is, without question, one of the hardest books I’ve ever read.

At first, I put the struggle down to circumstance. Italy was my first proper holiday in six months; my mind was unfocused because it had forgotten how to unwind. But that was only part of the story. The day I finished Tinker Creek, I missed my stop home on the metro because I was so locked into its final paragraphs.

The main reason Tinker Creek was so challenging is that the book is a product of patience, and I am an impatient person. Most chapters revolve around Dillard heading out to the creek and just waiting. For a muskrat to appear, a praying mantis egg to hatch, a morning light to cast its mountain shadow. Sometimes, nature obliges; oftentimes, it does not. Dillard has to accept either way.

“I think beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”

The painstaking detail with which Dillard describes her surroundings demands undivided attention. Skimming simply doesn’t work. The detail she conjures is so specific and intricate that unless you take in every word, you have no idea what’s going on. I wanted to run through Dillard’s world, and she wouldn’t let me. Her sentences held onto the back of my shirt and whispered in my ear, Slow down, Lauren, slow down. Watch with me. You’ll see.

“It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the muddy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and flash! The sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn’t watch for it. It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over a dun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creek’s surface, very slow and steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s tuning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone.”

Beyond testing my patience, Tinker Creek induced some envy. How was it possible to be so present, to see the natural world—in all its varied wonder—and recall it so vividly? My partner and I walked around the Padua Botanical Gardens one blistering afternoon during the second half of our Italy trip; with Dillard’s words ringing in my ears, I was prepared to be awed. Instead, I breezed past the 20 species of cacti and daydreamed about a shaded nap on the entrance bench.

I thought about abandoning Tinker Creek several times. I was on holiday, after all. Life is too short to finish a book you’re not enjoying. Except, I wasn’t not enjoying it. Annie was getting under my skin.

The first stop on our Northern Italy tour was Treviso. It’s a small, medieval city that charms its visitors with well-preserved canals, faded frescos, and proximity to Venice and the Prosecco hills.

After a few days of mooching around the stone-paved streets and drinking too many midday spritzes, we decided to venture out of the city. Our walking route was the Restera, a scenic path that follows the left bank of the Sile River as it flows out of Treviso, downstream, to an even sleepier town called Casier.

The morning sun was blazing, and we were sweating. To our right, the milky jade Sile waters were teasing relief, but we took the absence of bathers as a sign to stay on our feet.

Things got interesting one kilometre outside Casier. We passed what looked like an abandoned power station on the other side of the river and couldn’t quite decide if it was eerie. Then we turned into the next bend and entered another world.

In the late 1970s, for reasons I have yet to uncover, many of the wooden barges used to transport goods between Venice and Treviso were abandoned along the banks of this particular Sile river bend. Left to rot, the barges began sinking into the marshy water, from which dozens now protrude like gigantic fish skeletons in their own aquatic cemetery, the Cimitero dei Burcei.

Nature hadn’t wasted any time here. Colonising the barges were a profusion of plants, riverbirds, fish, and amphibians. Dragonflies were everywhere, darting over the water. I even spotted a family of ten turtles sunbathing on one of the barge planks. Natural abundance had emerged from man-made decay, and it was a beautiful sight.

Beauty is a central preoccupation in Tinker Creek. With every excursion out into the wild, Dillard is trying to answer why beauty exists and who exactly it’s for.

“The question is not what the bird is singing, but rather, why is the singing beautiful? …If the lyric is simply “mine mine mine”, then why the extravagance of the score?... Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code.”

Dillard takes it as a given that beauty is not a subjective projection in the human mind but rather an objective property of the natural world. Consequently, failure to notice the beauty around oneself is a failure of both attention and humility—of not “trying to be there.”

I’m bad at paying attention to what’s around me. At least, that’s what I tell myself when worrying about my increasingly poor midterm memory and orientation skills. Yet when it comes to my media diet, I’m obsessed with paying attention. I tell myself that the choices about what we notice are, in fact, choices about who we want to be.

What kind of person does this make me, exactly?

In New York, one thing I did notice was just how many commuters walk with their phones in their faces. Right up close, either staring at or talking straight into the screen.

I also noticed just how many homeless people were on the streets and how many of them seemed to be living with serious mental and/or physical challenges to degrees I have not witnessed before.

In recent years, the number of people experiencing homelessness in New York City has reached its highest level since the Great Depression. The Coalition for the Homeless estimates 350,000 people were without homes in May 2025. That’s 4.2% of New Yorkers.

On my third day in the city, I watched a homeless man stand in front of the office building next to ours, with all his worldly possessions stacked on a trolley, and take a shower. Soap suds were spewing down his stained clothes as he poured a large bottle of water over himself with one hand and scrubbed with the other. Bent double, head shaking like a wet dog. Commuters walked on.

Wherever I walked in Manhattan, the smell of either piss, faeces, trash, weed, drains, or a concoction of the above was wafting in the thick, humid July air. I walked home from work one evening past a pile of human shit; my partner saw a man defecate in broad daylight on the sidewalk opposite our hotel, then light up a spliff. Police officers were further down the road and seemed unbothered.

A few days before the shower scene, I was standing in line for a morning coffee in Midtown when another homeless man stole all the tips from the counter. Tall, dirty, and hunched, he snatched so fast he was out of the door by the time the empty jar hit the ground. The barista turned to her colleague and said she’d given up trying to stop him. She didn’t get paid enough for that shit.

“Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it. It is, as Ruskin says, 'not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.' . . . I have to say the words, describe what I'm seeing. . . . But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present.”

Unless we call attention to what passes before our eyes, we simply won’t see it. Reading these words from Annie alongside what I was witnessing in New York felt oddly resonant. It was now clear: New Yorkers walk with their phones in front of their faces to shield themselves from the deprivation around them. Not calling attention to the city’s horrors is an act of self-preservation, a privileged one at that, but an understandable one all the same.

Tinker Creek was filled with horrors, too. In documenting nature, Annie couldn’t avoid it, and that was precisely the point: to explore how the same natural world can produce moments of transcendent beauty and casual brutality without any apparent explanation or coherence.

“Nature will try anything once. This is what the sign of the insects says. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too grotesque. If you’re dealing with organic compounds, then let them combine. If it works, if it quickens, set it clacking in the grass; there’s always room for one more; you ain’t so handsome yourself. This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent.”

The most harrowing moment for me in Tinker Creek is about a moth. It’s a memory Annie has from school. One day, a fellow pupil brings a Polyphemus moth cocoon to class, and the teacher puts it in a jar so they can all observe it. Impatient, the children take the cocoon out of the jar and pass it around. Eventually, it starts to vibrate, activated by the warmth of their hands. The teacher throws the cocoon back into the jar, and it hatches. Most newly hatched moths and butterflies must spread their wings immediately after emerging from the cocoon so the wing resin can harden to enable flight. But in this jar, this Polyphemus moth cannot do that. So its wings are lacquered shut. The teacher releases the moth on the sidewalk next to the school playground, and young Annie watches it walk away. Damned to the ground, forever. Cruelty is a mystery and a waste of pain, adult Annie writes, closing the segment. And I’m wracked to the point of tears.

Was cruelty such a mystery in this case? Unintended, yes, but not mysterious. Whenever I think about the hunched man in the coffee shop, I see a giant, heaving Polyphemus.

My last full afternoon in New York was spent with two old friends, a couple whom I first met several years ago in Stockholm. They now live in Brooklyn, in a converted brownstone townhouse, on a street with a mixture of front courtyards and stoops. This street turned out to be a very special place.

My friends and I spent a few unhurried hours on the west side of Prospect Park with their dog and another two of their friends. The humidity had finally lifted a little, and the sky couldn’t decide if it wanted to rain. Hunger eventually kicked in and sent us all back towards my friends’ apartment. The plan was to drop off the dog and go in search of an early dinner.

As we walked up the street, my friends spotted their neighbours in the front courtyard and started greeting them in Spanish. These neighbours, also a couple, were originally from Cuba and had moved to this part of New York in the 60s during the Cuban Revolution. They’d lived in this same ground-floor Brooklyn apartment for over forty years, two-thirds of their married life. The husband was in his nineties, the wife in her eighties.

I got to learn these details because the neighbours invited me and the two other friends to join them in their courtyard. One of these friends also happened to be Cuban and translated whenever the other friend and I got stuck, which was often. She asked the couple about their early life in New York, and the wife immediately called back a famous social club where they would go and practice their favourite kind of Cuban dance, young in love. When she blanked on the details a couple of times, her husband filled in the gaps—he is older, but her memory is not as good.

Our friends returned ten minutes later without their dog, ready to lead us to dinner. The wife told us how lovely it was to meet us three women, not least since young people barely ever spoke to them. After we each gave her and her husband a kiss goodbye on the cheek, the wife turned to our friends on the other side of the courtyard gate and said in English,

“See, we’ve had flowers in our garden.”

“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and see what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right questions into the swaddling band of darkness or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.”

Tinker Creek has taught me the value of seeing. Not just beauty, but also ugliness. Both are unfolding around us constantly, on scales big and small, whether we sense them or not, and something started changing in me when I tried to be there for all of it—even the moments that were painful. Annie took this intention with her out into nature, and there were no humans in sight. The nature I observed was different. The casual brutality I witnessed on the streets of New York seemed coherent in its injustice, and according to my colleagues, mild compared to what they had seen. There is no praise to choir here, but plenty of questions to wail.

The cultural critic Ted Gioia included Tinker Creek in The Anti-Tech Canon, his counter to the ‘vague tech canon’ meme from 2024, where famous tech founders like Patrick Collison attempted to list the most influential books on the Silicon Valley psyche, revealing in the process a stark but unsurprising dearth of fiction (beyond sci-fi) and writing by women.

Gioia describes Tinker Creek as an education in developing an embodied, empathetic relationship with the real world. Embodied and empathetic are key words here. I think this is what Annie is getting to when she talks about needing to verbalise what she has seen in order to actually see it.

When I first sat down to write this piece up high in my New York hotel room, I thought it would be easy. All I had to do was describe what I had been seeing, and I had seen plenty. Like Annie, I also had journal entries to help me. But it wasn’t that straightforward. To turn my observations into words, I had to pull my memories of these fleeting summer moments—of wonder and disgust alike—deeper into myself. Only then could I truly see them. Once they were alive in my body.

It doesn’t always take writing for me to feel alive to the world. I have also been building this muscle in real-time without recognising it.

In April, I flew to London to attend a funeral. The mother of my first and oldest childhood friend had passed away after long-standing health struggles. The wake was taking place at their family house, next door to the one I had lived in for the first eighteen years of my life, which I had not visited since my family and I moved away in 2009.

My neighbours’ house held many mixed memories. Once, when I was about four or five, I asked my mum if I could go around and play with my friend. She told me to call and ask, and so I did. My friend’s mother accepted my request and cooked us dinner after playtime, at which point she told me that it was rude to invite oneself over to another person’s house. I stared down at my plate in shame. Years later, when we were teenagers and my friend was in the throes of a ferocious eating disorder, I would sometimes see my friend staring down at her plate, howling in disgust. We lived in semi-detached houses and could see straight through each other’s kitchen windows.

At the wake, I spotted a familiar framed picture outside the door to that same kitchen. It was a photograph of me, my friend, her older brother, and another boy and girl who lived one door further down. We were standing outside my kitchen back door in the dark. Everyone was dressed in their outdoor attire except me. The youngest of all five children, I was wearing a red long-sleeved dress with big black flowers and thick white tights. No shoes. All grin. It was December, and my friend’s father, who loves music, suggested we go carol-singing around the neighbourhood. He had gathered the other children and walked them over to my house to fetch me, where he wanted to take a picture before we set off. That’s why I wasn’t wearing any shoes: I was so excited about having our photo taken, I ran straight outside onto the cold stone patio to say cheeeese. That Christmas, my friend’s father gave all three households a framed copy of the photograph. Beneath each picture read “The Haslemere Wassailers” in gold calligraphy.

My friend came to her mother’s funeral with her husband and two young daughters. Her older brother was also with his son and daughter. It was a surprisingly warm, sunny day for early April, so the wake guests were spilling out from the living room into the back garden. After coffee and cake had done the rounds, the three of us found ourselves on the big red sofa with the children—the next generation of Wassailers. I asked if someone would take a picture. Everyone squeezed in tight, and that’s when I felt it: a soft but acute awareness of what was going on—in this very moment, and how right it all was—spreading inside my chest. It stayed with me long after I left, as I rode the tube back into central London, and it’s with me now, as I try to turn the memory into words.

This is the longest piece I’ve ever shared here, and I suspect many won’t have made it this far. That’s okay. The words were still worth it.

“Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock – more than a maple – a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”