Terror and Celebration

By Melvin Maddocks

PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

by ANNIE DILLARD

271 pages. Harper's Magazine Press.

$7.95.

At first she seems to fit into a pattern as predictable as a wildlife calendar, this Annie Dillard, the sensitive young woman with folded hands on the dust jacket, who looks out of her cottage window on nature and, sure enough, starting right on schedule with January, records the seasons as they come and go at Tinker Creek in Virginia. After the obligatory prologue resolving to "cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity," pace Thoreau, she introduces her obligatory cat and a goldfish named Ellery Channing. Then onto your feet. In "the long slant of light that means good walking," she points out the sights: the creek, 17 ft. wide; a favorite Osage orange tree; a sycamore log bridge; a tiny grassy island; a quarry; woods leading up to the Blue Ridge Mountains: Brushy, McAfee's Knob, Dead Man.

Reader, beware of this deceptive girl, mouthing her piety about "the secret of seeing" being "the pearl of great price," modestly insisting, "I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood." Here is no gentle romantic twirling a buttercup, no graceful inscriber of 365 inspirational prose poems. As she guides the attention to a muskrat, to a monarch butterfly, a heron or a coot, Miss Dillard is stalking the reader as surely as any predator stalks its game.

Four times in the first two pages she uses the word "mystery." With a kind of metaphysical awe she notes that there are 228 muscles in the head of a caterpillar, 6 million leaves on a big elm, 14 billion root hairs on a rye plant. Then she drops her bomb on Eden: Why? "My God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it," she cries. "The question from agnosticism is, Who turned on the lights? The question from faith is, Whatever for?"

In a passage of virtuoso understatement, Miss Dillard meticulously records the death of a small frog sucked dry by a giant water bug, and with eerie calm reports an afternoon she spent sitting beside a copperhead. "Evolution loves death more than it loves you and me," she quietly concludes. And as the very fecundity of this "eggy animal world" seems to hurry toward its equally profuse extinction, Miss Dillard mercilessly brings on bridge-battering floods and hemlock-bending whirlwinds. Here is not only a habitat of cruelty and "the waste of pain" but the savage and magnificent world of the Old Testament, presided over by a passionate Jehovah, with no Messiah in sight.

The author compares her life with that of an anchorite hermit. In fact, she is anything but a hairshirt recluse. She smokes cigarettes. She drives a car. Like nature, she is sometimes guilty of repetition and a certain atrocious lushness:"Silver trees cut into the black sky like a photographer's negative" and "clouds slide by like a tablecloth whipped off a table." But sooner or later, a pilgrim who refuses to believe in progress, she cuts back to the bone. To an age hooked on novelty, variety and pluralism, her message is as clear as William Blake's: "See a world in a grain of sand"--if you dare.

Allying herself to leeched turtles, she sums up herself and perhaps her species thus: "I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world." But what she has done is bear witness to her mystery as no leeched turtle (and few living writers) could--in a remarkable psalm of terror and celebration. qedMelvin Maddocks

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