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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Beauty and Horror
Divinity and Mystery
The Power of Books
Looking vs. Seeing
Humanity’s Relationship with Nature
Summary
Analysis
The book opens with Annie Dillard remembering a big old tomcat she used to own, who would often come in through the window in the dead of night and jump on her chest. Sometimes, he left bloody pawprints on her body, and she would wash them off in the morning, wondering what they signified. Even now, she still thinks about that cat, expects to find him on her chest of a morning, although he is long gone, and now she keeps the windows closed at night.
The footprints signify the mysteriousness and wildness of nature, which Dillard sees as its basic essence. There’s beauty, too (the rose-like appearance of the prints) but it arises out of the violence represented by the blood. For Dillard, these opposing forces are intimately linked. Dillard will return to the inseparability of beauty and horror and this central image of the bloody-pawed cat throughout the book.
Active
Themes
Dillard lives in a cabin on Tinker’s Creek in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. She likes to think of her cabin as a kind of anchorhold, although instead of being attached to the walls of a Christian church, it’s attached to the creek. In her anchorhold, she’s surrounded by creeks and mountains. The mountains are “passive” and receptive; the creeks are alive with noise and activity. The creeks represent the “stimulus” of the busy world and the mountains are “home.”
In late medieval Europe, faithful Christians called anchors or anchoresses would sometimes be closed into small rooms attached to churches to spend the rest of their lives devoted to prayer and meditation—the anchorholds which Dillard refers to here. By invoking Christianity and imagining herself as an anchoress, she hints that at least part of her explorations will be theological in nature. But by imagining her anchorhold attached to the creek, she substitutes nature for traditional Christianity as her religion.
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On a January morning, the noise of a wood duck rouses Dillard from sleep and draws her into a walk. She loves walking, particularly on days when the weather is dramatic. She encounters a lot of animals on her rambles, some of it wild, and some of it tamed, like the beef cows raised not too far from where she lives. The cows are so tame that they seem like brainless zombies.
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Near the cow pastures, there is an island in the middle of Tinker Creek, which is one of Dillard’s favorite places to visit. One day a few summers earlier, she’d been stomping around its periphery, scattering frogs, when she saw a strange and unsettling sight. A perfectly still frog seemed to deflate in front of her eyes. She knows that the frog was the victim of a “giant water bug,” which uses toxins to paralyze and dissolve the innards of its victims, which it then sucks out through a hole in the skin, but that didn’t make seeing it happen less unnerving. Predation is, however, a fact of the natural world, and observing it makes Dillard question the nature of the world in which she lives. Does it have meaning and organization? Probably, but these things are hard for human beings to put their fingers on.
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Sitting on the fallen sycamore tree that forms a natural bridge to the island, Dillard surveys the scene. The westerly wind pushes banks of clouds before it and between them there are brilliant flashes of sunlight illuminating different areas of the landscape: now this mountain, now that mountain, now the silvery sycamore trees, which shine so brightly they block out her view of the dark mountains beyond. By 5:30 in the afternoon the weather—which felt like an impresario performance by a “carnival magician”—has stabilized.
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Themes
This book is Dillard’s attempt to keep a “meteorological journal of the mind,” following in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau. She hopes she will remain alive throughout to her sense of wonder. All babies have this; when we arrive, human beings are all anxious to “explore the neighborhood.” That feeling quickly gets replaced with an arrogant belief in our own knowledge. To Dillard, exploring the world around her is both a “game” and the most serious job in the world. It entails risks, like getting distracted, and also sometimes having to confront what’s dark and scary. But the beautiful things more than make up for the scary ones.
To call herself an explorer isn’t quite enough. Dillard describes how some Indigenous peoples carved channels into their arrows so that, if their shots failed to kill their quarry, the channels would draw blood out from the wounds and splash it on the ground to make a trail that can easily be followed. She offers herself to readers as both the arrow and her book as the trail of blood that aims to show readers what it is that animates “us” as human beings.
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