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Light and Darkness
To Annie Dillard, the north—specifically the empty, cold expanses in and around the arctic circle—represents the spiritual realm. It is important to note that her knowledge of the north and the Indigenous people who live there comes primarily from books written by White explorers and anthropologists. Readers should thus take her assertions about Indigenous cultures and traditions not as culturally accurate but as evocative of the ideas she already associates with the north as a site of revelation and exposure. With scant resources and ample dangers, living in the north requires grappling with the dangerous and dark side of life on a regular basis. For Dillard, it thus represents a choice to live not despite danger and darkness but in kinship with it. The emptiness of the landscape—both the endless vistas of unbroken snow and the enduring darkness of night during the long polar winter—suggest a soul stripped of all extraneous beliefs and attachments, a soul capable of remaining in the present moment in the way Dillard wishes to. She also associates the emptiness of the north with via negativa, or path of negation, a mystical approach to understanding the divine that operates by identifying not what God is, but what God is not.
North Quotes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek quotes below all refer to the symbol of North. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3 Quotes
An Eskimo traveling alone in flat barrens will heap round stones to the height of a man, travel till he can no longer see the beacon, and build another. So I travel mute among these books, these eyeless men and women that people the empty plain. I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I’m terrified that I’ll run out […] In the meantime, I lose myself in a liturgy of names. The names of the men are Knud Rasmussen, Sir John Franklin, Peter Freuchen, Scott, Peary, and Byrd; Jedidiah Smith, Peter Skene Ogden, and Milton Sublette; or Daniel Boone singing on his blanket in the Green River Country. […] I like the clean urgency of these tales, the sense of being set out in a wilderness with a jackknife and a length of twine.
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Chapter 14 Quotes
At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a whisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it housed […] All you hold in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared so thin it passes a faint pink light, and almost as flexible as a straight razor. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve. I long for the North where unimpeded winds would hone me to such a pure slip of bone. But I’ll not go northing this year. I’ll stalk that floating pole and frigid air by waiting here. I wait on bridges; I wait, struck, on forest paths and meadow’s fringes, hilltops and banksides, day in and day out, and I receive a southing gift.
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North Symbol Timeline in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The timeline below shows where the symbol North appears in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3
...rather than rescue, kill trapped animals for food). She reads about Inuit people in the north building igloos and hunting on the ice and about explorers and frontiersmen like Knud Rasmussen,...
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...weather, she’d welcome them. Especially on winter nights when the wind howls out of the north so fiercely that the vibration of the walls agitates Dillard’s goldfish, Ellery Channing. Nothing seems...
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Chapter 7
Even in the far north, springtime is a season of migration and change. Walruses go on the move, followed by...
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Dillard recalls reading an anecdote about an Inuit hunter in the north who asked a Christian missionary if he would have gone to hell if he hadn’t...
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Chapter 11
Dillard spends the summer stalking along the banks of the creek. Far away in the north, she knows from reading in books, the Inuit people stalk their quarry in summer, too,...
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...the flash of the falling mockingbird, among the caribou herds the Inuit chase across the northern tundra in the summer—and they are worth the wait.
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Chapter 13
...out of each other. She then explains that some of the Indigenous people in the north—in Alaska—believe in reincarnation and consider it a privilege to find oneself in human form among...
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Chapter 14
Far away in the north, the ravens take to the air and fly south as the caribou, in their luxurious...
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Standing in southern Virginia, Dillard longs to go “northing,” to turn her face toward the pole and to start walking. As she wends her...
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