Guest Column by Paul Lindholt | FāVS News
Long ago I was a student of the writer and mystic Annie Dillard. This year she turned 80. She is still remembered fondly for her gorgeous prose and distinctive insights.
Her book that took the literary world by storm is “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” She was 28 when she published it. Fifty years ago this spring, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. She was washing lettuce in her sink when a call from New York told she was a celebrity.
In keeping with her early reputation as a mystic, she never mentions in her book her professor-husband whom she was living with. If she yearned to be a solitary sister committed solely to her art, she was also a lover, and the two have rarely meshed well in the public eye.
By the time I met her, she had left that husband in Virginia and settled on an island near Bellingham. She wore no wedding ring in her appearances in the Western Washington University student newspaper, but she put it on for interviews with Philip Yancey who wrote for Christianity Today.
Dillard’s mysticism
As her student, I asked her for a key to help unlock “Pilgrim.” She recommended the via negativa. The phrase means “to go where God is not.” She was interested in what may not be said — studied, discovered, written or uttered — about the ultimate perfection that is God. She also wanted to address the old question or complaint: how can a caring God stomach suffering?
Her answer to that question is complex. The world of nature is filled with beauty, if we only stop to relish it, but the somber laws of nature also teach us much about evil. The ceaseless feeding and breeding that preoccupies lower life forms horrifies. God has absconded from them.
One instance of that horror is the giant water bug. She saw it dine on a frog. The bug’s beaklike rostrum penetrated the frog from behind. It injected an enzyme that liquefied the frog, which “slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed.” In her private brand of mysticism, she searched for the via negativa, and it was “a monstrous and horrifying thing.”
She is not alone in imbuing Christianity with gothic tones. Evangelism is performative, and her book bends evangelical. As an unreconstructed Presbyterian in her mid-20s, she burned with the fire to inspire others toward the act of Christian witnessing. A neat trick in her repertoire is the way she both proselytizes and entertains her readers with her radical mystical visions.
Her worm’s-eye view of a praying mantis laying eggs is another instance. She sees “a mass of bubbles like spittle” and crouches mere inches away. The ovipositor (the egg-laying appendage of the insect) resembled “an engorged leech” or “a smashed finger,” she wrote. “It puffed like a concertina, it throbbed like a bellows; it roved, pumping, over the glistening, clabbered surface of the egg case testing and patting, thrusting and smoothing.” The eggs looked like “like tapioca pudding glued to a thorn.”
The scene recalls the discovery of the seedpods in the 1956 horror film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Dr. Miles Bennell is baffled when his patients complain that emotionless impostors have replaced their loved ones. At a party, Bennell notices strange egg cases hatching in a greenhouse. Their glistening, clabbered surfaces match the tapioca extruded by Dillard’s laboring female mantis.
How Annie Dillard’s words still shape the way we see creation
She also reports planarians — flatworms known for their remarkable regenerative capabilities — to be “cannibals, devouring everything alive that comes their way, including their own previously discarded tails which were in the process of growing a new head.” Such scenes, riffing on natural selection, throw shade on creation and the human capacity to tolerate the macabre.
Seen through empathetic Christian eyes, nature in “Pilgrim” is a series of stuttering mistakes God made. Those mistakes, embodiments of evil for her, lie outside human comprehension. If religious extremists influenced the youthful Annie Dillard, as she reported to an interviewer in 1992, then those influences might have swayed her to embrace a hyperbolic vision of creation.
One of the mystical tensions that fuels “Pilgrim” is how to reconcile sacred beauty with a cursed world. The book bears witness to deities that conflict. One of those deities charms us with a garden of earthly delights. The other stuns with the cruelty of nature red in tooth and claw.
On the Golden Jubilee of its Pulitzer Prize, it is apt to remember this powerful book.
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. FāVS News values diverse perspectives and thoughtful analysis on matters of faith and spirituality.
Nice to see your Dillard tribute, Paul….a well deserved reminder of “Pilgrim”‘s legacy, I’m still scratching my head over the idea that God made mistakes….are we one of them?
Interesting read. Thanks!