Annie Dillards Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Essay -- Annie Dillard Pilgrim

Annie Dillards Pilgrim at diddle brook Annie Dillard opens Pilgrim at Tinker Creek mysteriously, hinting at an unnamed presence. She toys with the longstanding epic images of battlefields and oracles, injecting an air of holiness and awe into the early(a)wise ordinary. In oral communication more poetic than prosaic, she sings the beautiful into the mundane. She deifies common and trivial findings. She extracts the most full(prenominal) language from wholly the possible permutations of words to elevate and exalt the normal. under her pen, her literary devices and her metaphors, a backyard stream becomes a inclose. Writing a prayer, Dillard becomes an instrument through which a ubiquitous spirit reveals itself. Yet in other cases, she latches on to an image of holiness and makes it ugly, horrifying, disturbing, as if to suggest that the manifestation of all that is holy need not always be pretty, that the gorgeous and the pale together comprise all that is holy, and witho ut one the other would be meaningless. The scripted words are a spiritual pilgrimage to the holy shrine where language tinkers with itself, makes a music unto itself, chips and shapes itself into the stuff of Dillards essays.Religious overtones score the text, emergent as references to Islam, Hasidism, and to a lesser extent, Christianity there are also discerning intimations of mysticism. Dillard plucks the title of the first essay, Heaven and Earth in Jest, from the Quran, quoting Allah directly. Describing the darkness capping the sea as a swaddling band for the sea (7), a repeated phrase, her language implies the Christ child. She makes a power evident without ever saying so aloud, explicitly, by naming it. By means of archaic phrasing, she conveys the sense that what ... ...(82). She defines purity as the spirits unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotedness to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total preoccupation (82), combining the lexicon of rel igion and private journey to elucidate how awareness and experience can integrate with openness to fulfill the state of innocence. McIlroy understands her pages of scientific and mystical experience in a two-dimensional way, leaving unturned the trine dimension where a seeming dichotomy merges and seams together opposites in a contiguous loop designed to illustrate a coherent and cover exploration of the outer world of the creek and the inner world of the mind. working CitedDillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York Quality Paperback, 1974.McIlroy, Gary. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the Burden of Science. American Literature 59 (1987) 71-84.