Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Modern Library Nonfiction #89)

(This is the twelfth entry in The Modern Library Nonfiction Challenge, an ambitious project to read and write about the Modern Library Nonfiction books from #100 to #1. There is also The Modern Library Reading Challenge, a fiction-based counterpart to this list. Previous entry: The Golden Bough.)

“Either this world, my mother, is a monster, or I myself am a freak.” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I was a sliver-thin, stupefyingly shy, and very excitable boy who disguised his bruises under the long sleeves of his shirt not long before the age of five. I was also a freak.

bedroomI had two maps pinned to the wall of my drafty bedroom, which had been hastily constructed into the east edge of the garage in a house painted pink (now turquoise, according to Google Maps). The first map was of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, in which I followed the quests of Bilbo and Frodo by finger as I wrapped my precocious, word-happy head around sentences that I’d secretly study from the trilogy I had purloined from the living room, a well-thumbed set that I was careful to put back to the shelves before my volatile and often sour father returned home from the chemical plant. In some of his rare calm moments, my father read aloud from The Lord of the Rings if he wasn’t too drunk, irascible, or violent. His voice led me to imagine Shelob’s thick spidery thistles, Smeagol’s slithering corpus, and kink open my eyes the next morning for any other surprises I might divine in my daily journeys to school. The second map was of Santa Clara County, a very real region that everyone now knows as Silicon Valley but that used to be a sweeping swath of working and lower middle-class domiciles. This was one of several dozen free maps of Northern California that I had procured from AAA with my mother’s help. One of the nice perks of being an AAA member was the ample sample of rectangular geographical foldouts. I swiftly memorized all of the streets, held spellbound by the floral and butterfly patterns of freeway intersections seen from a majestic bird’s eye view in an errant illustrated sky. My mother became easily lost while driving and I knew the avenues and the freeways in more than a dozen counties so well that I could always provide an easy cure for her confusion. It is a wonder that I never ended up working as a cab driver, although my spatial acumen has remained so keen over the years that, to this day, I can still pinpoint the precise angle in which you need to slide a thick unruly couch into the tricky recesses of a small Euclidean-angled apartment even when I am completely exhausted.

mlnf89These two maps seemed to be the apotheosis of cartographic art at the time, filling me with joy and wonder and possibility. It helped me cope with the many problems I lived with at home. I understood that there were other regions beyond my bedroom where I could wander in peace, where I could meet kinder people or take in the beatific comforts of a soothing lake (Vasona Lake, just west of Highway 17 in Los Gatos, had a little railroad spiraling around its southern tip and was my real-life counterpart to Lake Evendim), where the draw of Rivendell’s elvish population or the thrill of smoky Smaug stewing inside the Lonely Mountain collided against visions of imagined mountain dwellers I might meet somewhere within the greens and browns of Santa Teresa Hills and the majestic observatories staring brazenly into the cosmos at the end of uphill winding roads. I would soon start exploring the world I had espied from my improvised bedroom study on my bike, pedaling unfathomable miles into vicinities I had only dreamed about, always seeking parallels to what the Oxford professor had whipped up. I once ventured as far south as Gilroy down the Monterey Highway, which Google Maps now informs me is a thirty-six mile round trip, because my neglectful parents never kept tabs on how long I was out of the house or where I was going. They didn’t seem to care. As shameful as this was, I’m glad they didn’t. I needed an uncanny dominion, a territory to flesh out, in order to stay happy, humble, and alive.

The maps opened up my always hungry eyes to books, which contained equally bountiful spaces devoted to the real and the imaginary, unspooling further marks and points for me to find in the palpable world and, most importantly, within my heart. I always held onto this strange reverence for place to beat back the sadness after serving as my father’s punching bag. To this day, I remain an outlier, a nomad, a lifelong exile, a wanderer even as I sit still, a renegade hated for what people think I am, a black sheep who will never belong no matter how kind I am. I won’t make the mistake of painting myself as some virtuous paragon, but I’ve become so accustomed to being condemned on illusory cause, to having all-too-common cruelties inflicted upon me (such as the starry-eyed bourgie Burning Man sybarite I recently opened my heart to, who proceeded to deride the city that I love, along with the perceived deficiencies of my hard-won apartment, this after I had told her tales, not easily summoned, about what it was like to be rootless and without family and how home and togetherness remain sensitive subjects for me) that the limitless marvels of the universe parked in my back pocket or swiftly summoned from my shelves or my constant peregrinations remain reliable, life-affirming balms that help heal the scars and render the wounds invisible. Heartbreak and its accompanying gang of thugs often feel like a mob bashing in your ventricles in a devastatingly distinct way, even though the great cosmic joke is that everyone experiences it and we have to love anyway.

So when Annie Dillard’s poetic masterpiece Pilgrim at Tinker Creek entered my reading life, its ebullient commitment to finding grace and gratitude in a monstrous world reminded me that seeing and perceiving and delving and gaping awestruck at Mother Earth’s endless glories seemed to me one one of the best survival skills you can cultivate and that I may have accidentally stumbled upon. As I said, I’m a freak. But Dillard is one too. And there’s a good chance you may walk away from this book, which I highly urge you to read, feeling a comparable kinship, as I did to Dillard. Even if you already have a formidable arsenal of boundless curiosity ready to be summoned at a moment’s notice, this shining 1974 volume remains vital and indispensable and will stir your soul for the better, whether you’re happy or sad. Near the end of a disastrous year, we need these inspirational moments now more than ever.

* * *

“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.” – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard was only 28 when she wrote this stunning 20th century answer to Thoreau (the subject of her master’s thesis), which is both a perspicacious journal of journeying through the immediately accessible wild near her bucolic Southwestern Virginia perch and a daringly honest entreaty for consciousness and connection. Dillard’s worldview is so winningly inclusive that she can find wonder in such savage tableaux as a headless praying mantis clutching onto its mate or the larval creatures contained within a rock barnacle. The Washington Post claimed not long after Pilgrim‘s publication that the book was “selling so well on the West Coast and hipsters figure Annie Dillard’s some kind of female Castaneda, sitting up on Dead Man’s Mountain smoking mandrake roots and looking for Holes in the Horizon her guru said were there.” But Pilgrim, inspired in part from Colette’s Break of Day, is far from New Age nonsense. The book’s wise and erudite celebration of nature and spirituality was open and inspiring enough to charm even this urban-based secular humanist, who desperately needed a pick-me-up and a mandate to rejoin the world after a rapid-fire series of personal and political and romantic and artistic setbacks that occurred during the last two weeks.

For all of the book’s concerns with divinity, or what Dillard identifies as “a divine power that exists in a particular place, or that travels about over the face of the earth as a man might wander,” explicit gods don’t enter this meditation until a little under halfway through the book, where she points out jokingly how gods are often found on mountaintops and points out that God is an igniter as well as a destroyer, one that seeks invisibility for cover. And as someone who does not believe in a god and who would rather deposit his faith in imaginative storytelling and myth rather than the superstitions of religious ritual, I could nevertheless feel and accept the spiritual idea of being emotionally vulnerable while traversing into some majestic terrain. Or as Pascal wrote in Pensées 584 (quoted in part by Dillard), “God being thus hidden, every religion which does not affirm that God is hidden, is not true, and every religion which does not give the reason of it, is not instructive.”

Much of this awe comes through the humility of perceiving, of devoting yourself to sussing out every conceivable kernel that might present itself and uplift you on any given day and using this as the basis to push beyond the blinkered cage of your own self-consciousness. Dillard uses a metaphor of loose change throughout Pilgrim that neatly encapsulates this sentiment:

It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.

This is not too far removed from Thoreau’s faith in seeds: “Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.” The smug and insufferable Kathryn Schulzes of our world gleefully misread this great tradition of discovering possibilities in the small as arrogance, little realizing how their own blind and unimaginative hubris glows with crass Conde Nast entitlement as they fail to observe that Thoreau and Dillard were also acknowledging the ineluctable force of a bigger and fiercer world that will carry on with formidable complexity long after our dead bodies push against daisies. Faced with the choice of sustaining a sour Schulz-like apostasy or receiving every living day as a gift, I’d rather risk the arrogance of dreaming from the collected riches of what I have and what I can give rather than the gutless timidity of a prescriptive rigidity that fails to consider that we are all steeped in foolish and inconsistent behavior which, in the grand scheme of things, is ultimately insignificant.

Dillard is guided just as much by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as she is by religious and philosophical texts. The famous 1927 scientific law, which articulates how you can never know a particle’s speed and velocity at the same time, is very much comparable to chasing down some hidden deity or contending with some experiential palpitations when you understand that there simply is no answer, for one can feel but never fully comprehend the totality in a skirmish with Nature. It accounts for Dillard frequently noting that the towhee chirping on a treetop or the muskrat she observes chewing grass on a bank for forty minutes never see her. In seeing these amazing creatures carry on with their lives, who are completely oblivious to her own human vagaries, Dillard reminds us that this is very much the state of Nature, whether human or animal. If it is indeed arrogance to find awe and humility in this state of affairs, as Dillard and Thoreau clearly both did, then one’s every breath may as well be a Napoleonic puff of the chest.

Dillard is also smart and expansive enough to show us that, no matter where we reside, we are fated to brush up against the feral. She points to how arboreal enthusiasts in the Lower Bronx discovered a fifteen feet ailanthus tree growing from a lower Bronx garage and how New York must spend countless dollars each year to rid its underground water pipes of roots. Such realities are often contended with out of sight and out of mind, even as the New York apartment dweller battles cockroaches, but the reminder is another useful point for why we must always find the pennies and dare to dream and wander and take in, no matter what part of the nation we dwell in.

Another refreshing aspect of Pilgrim is the way in which Dillard confronts her own horrors with fecundity. Yes, even this graceful ruminator has the decency to confess her hangups about the unsettling rapidity with which moths lay their eggs in vast droves. She stops short at truly confronting “the pressure of birth and growth” that appalls her, shifting to plants as a way of evading animals and then retreating back to the blood-pumping phylum to take in blood flukes and aphid reproduction more as panorama rather than something to be felt. This volte-face isn’t entirely satisfying. On the other hand, Dillard is also bold enough to scoop up a cup of duck-pond water and peer at monostyla under a microscope. What this tells us is that there are clear limits to how far any of us are willing to delve, yet I cannot find it within me to chide Dillard too harshly for a journey she was not quite willing to take, for this is an honest and heartfelt chronicle.

While I’ve probably been “arrogant” in retreating at length to my past in an effort to articulate how Dillard’s book so moved me, I would say that Pilgrim at Tinker Creek represents a third map for my adult years. It is a true work of art that I am happy to pin to the walls of my mind, which seems more reliable than any childhood bedroom. This book has caused me to wonder why I have ignored so much and has demanded that that I open myself up to any penny I could potentially cherish and to ponder what undiscoverable terrain I might deign to take in as I continue to walk this earth. I do not believe in a god, but I do feel with all my heart that one compelling reason to live is to fearlessly approach all that remains hidden. There is no way that you’ll ever know or find everything, but Dillard’s magnificent volume certainly gives you many good reasons to try.

Next Up: Richard Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces!

The Bat Segundo Show: Kathryn Schulz

Kathryn Schulz appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #339. Ms. Schulz is most recently the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Feeling wrong about whether or not he’s right.

Author: Kathryn Schulz

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to first of all start off with Thomas Kuhn, who you bring up a few times. You note his observation that the breakdown of one belief system and the dawning of another is always characterized by an explosion of competing hypotheses. But he also argued that it was impossible to conduct science in the absence of a preexisting theory. This brings to mind the F. Scott Fitzgerald maxim that the sign of a first-rate intellectual is to be able to hold two opposing notions in the brain at the same time. How can the two opposing viewpoints viewpoint be reconciled with the Kuhnian viewpoint? Do you have any thoughts on this? Or is it really a matter of cognitive dissonance taking care of this problem?

Schulz: I don’t know that those two things are at odds with each other. I suspect that Thomas Kuhn would have been very much in favor of Fitzgerald’s notion that really sophisticated thinking involves the capacity to hold a belief while also being willing to entertain its antithesis, or entertaining evidence that potentially undermines it. And, of course, that’s what practicing scientists — at least in theory — do all the time. Now in practice, is everyone always out there in their labs questioning their own theories? Probably not. But it is part of the ethos in science in general. And there’s a political scientist I quite like named Philip Tetlock, who I cite in the book, who describes this kind of thinking as self-subversive thinking. Which is a phrase I really love. It’s this notion that you can believe something and simultaneously have this undercurrent in your brain that’s saying “Well, what if it’s not true in this situation?” or “What if this part of it’s right or that part of it’s wrong?” or “What if the whole thing falls apart?” And to me, that is the sign. Fitzgerald got it right. That is the sign of sophisticated thinking. And unless I’m missing something, I think Kuhn would have supported that.

Correspondent: Yeah. Well, he believed in this kind of halfway house. Of having competing hypotheses. Or even just having some middle ground. Some transitional middle ground. That’s why I ask the question of whether that middle ground is really reflective of the same Fitzgeraldian viewpoint.

Schulz: Right. I think one distinction is whether you’re talking about an individual person or a system. And I think what Kuhn was getting at was that when you have a scientific paradigm collapse. Like let’s say that we think that the sun revolves around the earth. And suddenly there’s a lot of challenges to that. And we start seeing some counter-evidence. Then there’s this exciting, but also panicky air where everybody is generating new theories to account for this evidence that doesn’t seem to make sense under the old theory. And so you have a whole system that’s in crisis and is generating new theories. And then you’re exactly right. You shift the pedals down. And you arrive at one that new established theory. And I do think that that’s how systems work. Whether it’s science or, for that matter, book publishing. Book publishing is in the middle of a Kuhnian paradigm crisis right now. Where we have an old model. we don’t know what the new model is. And in the meantime, there’s a million competing hypotheses. But within any given individual, I still think that you can hold a belief. And if you are a sophisticated thinker, undermine it, question it, and challenge it in all these ways.

Correspondent: I want to shift tacks and bring up the case of Penny Beerntsen, who you bring up in the book. She was absolutely insistent that Steven Avery had raped and assaulted her. DNA testing demonstrated that Avery was innocent. Then Avery got out of jail and proceeded to murder Teresa Halbach in 2005, the first and only time in the history of the Innocence Project that an exoneree has gone on to commit a violent crime. Penny though, which is a very interesting case — despite the assault, the misidentification, the murder trifecta – she was able to accept the objective evidence of Avery being innocent in relation to her, but guilty in relation to this other woman. What do you think factors into account for that fixed belief? Of being able to look upon the scenario with some objective quality? Is it a matter of having gone through the act of denial? Do you have any particular speculation? Or does it go back to this Kuhnian idea? That once she had gone through the bridge, she was able to reconcile the truth, so to speak. She was not wrong.

Schulz: Well, a couple of things. I mean, first, I will say that having spent quite a lot of time with Penny Beerntsen to get this story out of her and hear all the details, she impressed me as someone who is exceptionally, exceptionally thoughtful about wrongness. And in that respect, could be, probably should be a role model for all of us. And then I think the underlying question is, the one that I assume you’re getting at, is that, well, why? What is it that makes her so able to be responsive in the face of shifting evidence? Because it’s very, very hard to do. Especially in a situation where the stakes are so high, so emotional, so personal. And I asked her that question straight up. You know, how is that when so many people around you were unable to face this evidence — and for that matter, when so many people are unable to face very trivial instances in coping with wrongness — what do you think it is about you that made you able to do this? And it was obviously something she’d thought about a lot, and didn’t have a completely clear answer. In part because personalities are so complicated. And at the bottom of what’s going on, it has something to do with her personality. But one thing she said that was very interesting was that she had spent many years between her assault and Steven Avery’s exoneration working in the prison system. She essentially decided to take the horrible experience that had happened to her and tried to heal herself and other people by working with violent criminals and try and help them understand the impact of their crimes on their victims and on their communities, and really work within a rehabilitation law of criminal justice. So she spent years and years and years talking to people about facing up to being wrong. And I think that she ultimately felt like her turn came. And she could not fail to practice what she had preached.

The Bat Segundo Show #339: Kathryn Schulz (Download MP3)

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