Pilgrim at Tinker Creek...
1974, Annie Dillard
Things that have rattled around in my head for the last few days:
… see passage where Dillard narrates the pleasure of experiencing an unnarrated time in the woods while stalking muskrats. “For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I recieved impressions; I did not print out captions.” (200) (She attributes a charming ingenuity to photography (though they tell me I should not longer use that word to mean ‘ingenuousness’))
Also interested in her use of the microscope as a pleasure instrument rather than as science (or science for pleasure).
Giant water-strider section (early) and meditation on the motives of creation.
Dillard’s afterward on wanting to publish as A. Dillard or as a male pseudonym because “a great number of otherwise admirable men do not read books that American women write.”
Also, Dillard’s appetite for trivia reminds me of Rebecca :-)
