Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
it's not "walden 2.0" and it's important to understand why
Previous nineteen posts in this series on Marilynne Summers Robinson and Annie Doak Dillard, two writers I absolutely love.
Now that a particularly purgatorial semester is over I have been, for whatever unimaginable reason, trying to teach myself physics. Not well enough to do it, obviously — just well enough to kind of follow along at a distance. (I’m not crazy.) I think of it as like a music appreciation class. At least sometimes, the more you know about sonata form, the more you can be like, “Damn, that’s a creative use of sonata form!” But it’s music appreciation class for the fundamental laws of reality, so even at this dumbed-down level, it means I’m very slowly reading — and very frequently stopping to reread and reread again — books by people like Leonard Susskind and Sean Carroll that are marketed to normal people but probably written at a level where you should have had a college calc class or two under your belt, and that pretty recently. (Maybe I am crazy.) This is an objectively stupid thing to be doing right now; I have a syllabus overhaul to do, a house to try to take care of, friendships to maintain, lots of writing to be doing. Theoretically I’d like to actually write the novel I keep talking about. Theoretically I’d like to be of some use to my fellow human beings.
One thing that comes up a lot in these books is the idea of systems. Closed systems, open systems, cycles within, etc. If I have understood what I have read correctly, we’re making something of a judgment call when we label something an open system. Closed systems aren’t affected by anything outside themselves — the universe would be a closed system, if we just punt on the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?”1 — while open systems are open to external influence. So an open system that is also an important part of a different system could just as well be thought of as … a component of a larger system that includes both it and the different system that it’s an important part of. I’d assume. I mean, right? Just a layperson here.
I bring all this up because the word “individualism” has dogged us throughout this project and will continue to do so. It is the accusation — usually it functions as an accusation — hurled at Thoreau’s Walden, which is the most obvious influence on Annie Dillard’s first published book of prose, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It is posed by Whitman, whose individualism can become an unpleasant egoism. Robinson will try to reclaim and defend the word outright in the essay “My Western Roots” and will do so implicitly … in pretty much everything she writes, in the form of characters like Sylvie and Jack, in her left-liberal patriotism. In the circles where I travel, “individualism” is a word used to dismiss. Often prefaced with “Western,” it means something different in every conversation, but that thing is always bad.
Why are Walden and Pilgrim always grouped together? The voices of the books could not be more different. Thoreau is all declarations; Dillard is all questions. Thoreau achieves memorability by sacrificing nuance: “The great mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” for example. Nobody ever forgets that sentence once they’ve read it. The rhythm is like somebody hammering a plaque to a wall: Da da. Da. Da da; da da da dada dadadada." Stark. The alliteration (mass, men, lead, lives, mass, des-, men, -tion) strengthens the effect. You’re never getting that plaque off the wall. You’ll think of this sentence whenever you meet somebody who led a life you were tempted to live, whenever you have a long talk with somebody who traded some of your securities for risks and feels as ambivalent as you do, whenever you remember somebody you could have hooked up with and didn’t. For the rest of your life. But is it even true? Viewed another way, it sounds like something a 16-year-old tells themselves about all the adults and classmates that they think they’ve seen through when they haven’t even looked.