Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
What is the true nature of Nature? Is it a harmonious, interconnected system, operating according to the principles of co-dependence and benevolence? Or is it red in tooth and claw, an unfeeling, unthinking force, in which the individual is overwhelmed and subsumed to serve a larger purpose, one mysterious and obscure? This is what this volume is all about: an exploration into the nature of Nature, an attempt to discover the true character of the natural world around us. Appropriately, it is neither a rapturous celebration of Nature, nor a grim survey of its various cruelties. Rather, like Nature itself, it is something in between, and something quite beautiful. It is a collection of related essays recounting the author's thoughts on Nature as she observes the ecological happenings of the eponymous Tinker Creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge valley for a period of several years.
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- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
- Late to the party, but for anyone looking for inspiration:
Fiction: Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig) by Thomas Mann[0]
Nonfiction: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard[1]
Illustrated: The Insect God by Edward Gorey
- Brueggemann is amazing.
I would also add, in no particular order:
- wisdom of the desert (merton's translation of the sayings of the desert fathers)
- pilgrim at tinker creek; annie dillard
- goatwalking, jim corbett
- Impostors of God: Inquiries into our favorite Idols, william stringfellow
- the new testament, trans. by david bentley hart
- the sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel
- zen flesh, zen bones
- moral man, immoral society -- neibuhr
- principia discordia
- the poetry and sermons of john donne
- many other poets.
- "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" is her signature book and for many (myself included) a spiritual experience to read.
"The Writing Life" is the best book about the process of creating that I have ever read, and I often suggest it to my design teams. (Designers like to read books about design, but you don't hire designers because they're good at words. You want to read about creating? Read books by writers.)
One of my favorite excerpts from The Writing Life:
> A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well," the writer said, “I don’t know... Do you like sentences?" The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of the paint."
- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It's such a calm, meditative book. In fact, IIRC it has a chapter on fecundity that is similar to this essay.
- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm. Dillard has a way with words that is both eloquent and a little violent, and she influenced how I write just as much as Strunk and White's Elements of Style.
Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach for its captivating presentation of some very complicated ideas (at least to the 17 year old kid who read this for the first time). This book was published around the time that I was growing from hobby programming to writing software as a career, and it exposed me to non-trivial proofs, LISP, and recursion in general.
Vernor Vinge's The Peace War. It's a bit stupid, but . . . I want to make the tech in this book become reality :-) Bobbles are sheer fantasy, of course, but the Tinker tech stack would be a lot of fun.
