Introduction to the Author

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Annie Dillard (1945 – 2026) is one of our finest contemporary writers. She has written essays, poetry, memoirs, and literary criticism. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is perhaps her best known book, reminding readers of Thoreau’s Walden Pond. It won the Pulitzer Prize. She spent a year living alone on Tinker Creek in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley, reading lots of books and taking hikes and simply observing. The book wrestles with faith in a loving God as she encounters the harshness of nature. In the following selection the author addresses the importance of seeing the world around us, unimpeded by our inner distractions. Her observations of nature are intriguing as she is able to take something mundane and see in it something extraordinary. Her other notable works are Holy the Firm and Teaching a Stone to Talk.

1. Two Ways of Seeing

Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it. It is, as Ruskin says, “not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.” My eyes alone can’t solve analogy tests using figures, the ones which show, with increasing elaborations, a big square, then a small square in a big square, then a big triangle, and expect me to find a small triangle in a big triangle. I have to say the words, describe what I’m seeing.

If Tinker Mountain erupted, I’d be likely to notice. But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present. It’s not that I’m observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio.

When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head. Some days when a mist covers the mountains, when the muskrats won’t show and the microscope’s mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.

But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

2. Seeing a New World

It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream, I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the muddy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and flash! the sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn’t watch for it. It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over a dun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creek’s surface, very slow and steady.

So I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone.

3. The Realm of the Real

When I see this way I see truly. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses. I am the man who watches the baseball game in silence in an empty stadium. I see the game purely; I’m abstracted and dazed. When it’s all over and the white-suited players lope off the green field to their shadowed dugouts, I leap to my feet; I cheer and cheer.

But I can’t go out and try to see this way. I’ll fail, I’ll go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of the useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangles before my eyes. The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod.

The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash cannot be dammed, and trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely without utterance. “Launch into the deep,” says Jacques Ellul, “and you shall see.”

4. The Secret of Seeing

The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms.

I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth Ailinon, alleluia! I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

5. The tree with the lights in It

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day, I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed.

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.

Bible Selection: Mark 8:22 – 26

They came to Bethsaida. Some people brought a blind man to him and begged him to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village; and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Can you see anything?” And the man looked up and said, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.” Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he looked intently and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Then he sent him away to his home, saying, “Do not even go into the village.”

Questions

The following questions can be used for discussion with a small group, or used for journal reflections by individuals.
1. What are the “two ways of seeing”?
2. Have you ever had an experience like Annie Dillard when you “blurred” your eyes and suddenly saw a whole new world? If so, describe your experience.
3. The author calls our internal dialogue “the mind’s muddy river.” Is she counseling us to fight that “flow of trivia and trash” so that we can see?
What is her solution?
4. Have you ever been “struck” by the created world as if you were a bell? Why do you think God created such a world?
5. The story from Mark 8 shows how often our healing is gradual. The man could see, but it was blurry. Then Jesus touched him a second time. How has God touched, then re-touched you in order to help you see?

Exercises

The following exercises can be done by individuals, shared between spiritual friends, or used in the context of a small group. Choose one or more of the following.
1. Take a walk outdoors. Try to notice everything you can. Name the colors, talk out loud, point out every tree and rock and leaf and bird. Increase your capacity to see.
2. Try Dillard’s “blurring” of your eyes as you look around you — even indoors.
See if you can see another world you might have missed.
3. Annie talks about our internal dialogue as a “ceaseless flow of trivia and trash.” Monitor your inner chatter for fifteen minutes. Simply observe it, without judgment. Write down anything you may have learned in a journal.
4. Sometimes, like the blind man, we need a second touch. Take time to evaluate how God has healed you, and where you might need additional healing.
Ask God to touch you again.

Reflections

Annie Dillard’s observations here are in reality an extended commentary upon Jesus’ famous words that “they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not… But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear” (Matt. 13:13, 16, KJV). How often I look only with the eyes, listen only with the ears, and fail to look and to listen with the heart. We are told in Scripture that when Jesus saw the multitudes “he was moved with compassion on them” (Matt. 9:36, KJV). All too often when I see the multitudes I am disgusted or frightened or simply disinterested. Seeing I have not seen and hearing I have not heard.

When I walk among the pines in our little acreage what do I see? Sometimes only a little forest of tress with deer shyly walking along the gullies and an occasional fox scampering home. But there are other times, times when I see more: a sign of hope in the meadowlark’s song, an icon of strength in the towering spires that stretch skyward, and an embodiment of tenderness in the doe who stands quiet and still outside my study window as her fawn sucks contentedly.

Still, my seeing is so limited, so fragmented, so partial. May I — may we all — see ever more truly, ever more fully. See, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

—Richard J. Foster