Good thing that there's a pile of neglected books at hand to keep me sane.
For nearly a year, I have been working my way through "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek", Annie Dillard's 1974 love song to the southwestern Virginia woodlands. Fellow 1975 Cornellian, bibliophile, and close friend Barbara Cook loaned the paperback to me some time ago; it is a long, slow read, and worth it.
I must return the book to her some day soon.
I must return the book to her some day soon.
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| Tinker Creek -- photo from wildernessescapades.com |
What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun's surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet the winds are blowing, the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the snoweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral.
Lick a finger: feel the now. -- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
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