PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

          PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK
                                       - Annie Dillard

Introduction :-
         Annie Doak, known as Annie Dillard is an American poet and naturalist. She was born on April 30, 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Getting inspired by the writers like Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, Dillard writes compressed lyric poetry and prose. Dillard’s essays of contemplation on the world of nature made her popular in the mainstream literature. She is also a naturalist theologian, collagist and a singer. Her major works are Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974), Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Holy the Firm (1977), Living by Fiction (1982) and An American Childhood (1987). An American Childhood is her autobiography.
          Dillard’s essays were highly poetic and deeply philosophical. She puts together her ideas as a theologian and naturalist when she says ‘strange things become familiar and vice versa'. She had a very joyful childhood and she used to read on a wide range of subjects such as Geology, Natural History, entomology, poetry and so on. Her mother influenced her a lot to shape her holistic approach to nature. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general notification in 1975 for her work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. 

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
        This book details the narrator's explorations near her home, and various contemplations on nature and life. The title refers to Tinker Creek, which is outside Roanoke in Virginia's the Blue
Ridge Mountains. Dillard began writing Pilgrim in the spring of 1973, using her personal journals as inspiration. Separated into four sections that signify each of the seasons, the narrative takes place over the period of one year. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard looks at the marvels of nature and searches for God. She is undertaking a pilgrimage into nature and observes nature with a microscopic eye. This book has been described as a naturalist classic. It portrays the personal
experience of Dillard during a whole year in her neighborhood in Tinker Creek. She carefully crafted this by observing and researching the natural world.
      
Outline of the Text
         In the opening paragraph of the excerpt, she begins with the common experience regarding the frogs and their invisible positions. The frogs would hide somewhere and jumped over your feet and splash into the water. We would yell in the panic obviously. For the narrator, it is always an amusement. She even observes the changes in texture of the light reflected from the mud bunk, water, grass or frog The frog looks like a schematic diagram of amphibian. When she keep
closer, the frog begins to shrink like a deflating football. Suddenly the frog, she saw was being sucked by a giant water bug. She describes how does water bugs eat their prey. These descriptions make us think about how the biological cycle of this organic world has created in such a manner.
           Then she gives the minute details of the eating style of animals. There are different methods of eating by animals. Some carnivorous animals eat their prey alive. The common way of defeat the prey is to down or grasp, and then eating at the whole, or biting. Frogs stuff their preys
on the tongue, which is sticky.
            These small wonders in nature drive her thought to God and his creations. She quotes from the Koran to talk about the creation. In the Koran, Allah asks "The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?"She invites our attention to the very act of
creation and the existence of God. The term ‘Deus Absconditus’ was used by Blaise Pascal, one of the greatest Christian apologists , physicist and writer, to describe the notion of the creator. It is
a Latin phrase means the hidden God. Einstein describes God as subtle, but not malicious. He says that ‘nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur not by her cunning'. For Einstein, God was a metaphor for nature and natural order.
             Dillard believes that God has not absconded but spread as a fabric of spirit very subtly and we can only feel blindly of its hem. She wonders, however, if our consciousness has evolved to that point.

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