Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Annie Dillard

 

          Annie Dillard, a best-known American author, is also a naturalist, theologian, collagist and a singer. Her prose is richly poetic and densely philosophic. It is said, when she writes, ‘Strange things become familiar and familiar things become strange’. ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’ is her pilgrimage in Tinker Creek, Virginia. It is actually a spiritual excursion into the natural world. She scrutinises nature with a monastic patience and with a microscopic eye. Though she had thought that the book would be read only by a few monks, it won the Pulitzer prize.

       On a summer day, when she walked along the grassy edge of the Island in Tinker Creek, frogs were flying all around her. She was incredibly amused then. However, at the end of the Island, she noticed a small green frog. It was exactly half in and half out of the water. She crept closer and knelt on the grass, four feet away and observed it. When she was looking at its wide dull eyes, it slowly crumpled and began to sink like a deflating football. Then only she realized that it was a giant water bug that sucked out the frog. It seized the frog with its forelegs and paralyzed it by injecting enzymes into it, which might have dissolved the frog’s muscles, bones and organs. Thus, the frog she saw was being sucked by a giant water bug. It is quite common in warm fresh water. Doubtless all carnivorous animals devour their prey alive. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac or shelter. It is the law of the nature. It is also the will and pleasure of God.

          Here, Dillard talks about the role of the creator by quoting, ‘The heaven and earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made in jest?’ from Koran. Here she makes us to think and wonder about the created universe spanning an unthinkable void and with an unthinkable profusion of forms. That was why, Blaise Pascal, the great French Christian apologist and mathematician of 17th century once said, 

“we are all in a state to be pitied because we see too much to deny and too little to be sure." But we can’t simply say that having created the universe, God hath turned his back to it. Here she aptly quotes Einstein’s words, ‘God is subtle but not malicious’. Actually, God was a metaphor for nature to Einstein. Nature conceals its mystery by means of essential grandeur, not by cunning. God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread. So, God and nature are very difficult to analyse or describe but not evil or destructive. God hath set bars and doors to everything. Even the dark, deep sea has its limit as God hath said, “hitherto shall thou come, but no further”. Thus, on seeing things like the sucking out of the frog by the giant water bug, we should not fail to think about the mystery of nature, its grandeur and its self-disciplined order.

          Thus, by presenting the strange drama of life where a water bug sucks the life out of frog, she makes the reader think and muse about the creator’s vision and purport. However, by asking a question at the end, like “Are we all playing pinnacle in the bottom of a boat on our rowing out to the thick darkness? She reminds us not to turn our blind eyes towards the marvels of nature by wasting our valuable time on trivial things.

------Thulasidharan