On the day of the eclipse back in April, walking through Boston Commons on a fine spring afternoon as every expectant face turned upward, I thought again of Annie Dillard’s wondrously dislocating essay “Total Eclipse,” which I have reread more times than I can count. “My hands were silver,” she wrote. “All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal that the wind laid down.”
Then I read “This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature,” the forthcoming book by the Nashville naturalist Joanna Brichetto, which begins with an epigraph from “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” the book that won Ms. Dillard a Pulitzer Prize when she was 29 years old: “Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.”
And then, as if I were a dullard the universe can’t trust to take a hint, the writer Jennifer Justice mentioned in her wonderful Substack newsletter that 2024 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” a book that changed me when I was 18 as thoroughly as the eclipse changed Annie Dillard.
On the same day, if you can believe it, the novelist Barbara Kingsolver singled out “Tinker Creek” in an Earth Day recollection for The Washington Post: “Her writing helped me see nature not as a collection of things to know or possess, but a world of conjoined lives, holy and complete, with or without me.”
Clearly it was time to read “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” again. I first read it in 1980, gobbling up the full book after a section of it appeared in my composition textbook. I’ve been afraid to reread it ever since. When you emerge from a book entirely changed, there’s almost no chance the same transfiguration will happen again.
To reread a beloved book after a long time away is always a great risk. If it falls flat on second reading, a feeling of grief descends, as though you’d lost a beloved human and not simply a specific arrangement of words that once mattered to you for some reason you may no longer remember. To lose a book in this way feels of a kind with losing a friend.
But for a book that is more than merely a favorite, a book that has had a hand in creating you, the risk of loss is even greater. A book that is saying exactly what you desperately need to hear at a time when nothing else in your own plodding life is saying it, a book in which somehow, miraculously, every word is arranged as though to pierce your deepest heart and lodge itself there, living and whole — if you were to lose that book, you would feel that you had lost some necessary part of yourself. Or perhaps you would still have it, but it would become a phantom limb, no longer serving you except as a source of pain.
For most of my life I was an indefatigable rereader. During my decade as a high school teacher, I reread so many poems and so many lines from Shakespeare’s plays that I committed many of them to memory. I spent my summers rereading the novels I had assigned my future students to read before they arrived.
And one of the sweetest parts of parenthood was sharing treasured childhood books with my sons. Reading to them, I remembered the little girl I was, sometimes welling over with feelings too big to express, who would close the door to her room and read the ending of “Charlotte’s Web” again. The tears and the words rushed together to create a comfort I understand now in a way I could not when I was 8. Grief eases just a little when the words match the feelings, and tears are a kind of relief in any case. It is a gift when body, soul and language are of a piece for once.
Part of the pleasure of rereading a dear old book is the chance to remember who I was when I first read it and to take my own measure by standing inside its light once more. But my time for reading is rarely a matter of my own straightforward choice anymore. I read because I need to learn, or because I am eager to support the work of other writers, and I am a slow, slow reader. As the years march on, it feels almost wasteful to reread a favorite when there are so many books that I have not yet read at all. The teetering piles torment me.
The poet Camille T. Dungy reread “Tinker Creek” in 2020, as she was beginning to write “Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden,” a book so beautiful and moving that it is arguably Ms. Dungy’s own “Tinker Creek.” Rereading the classic text brought home to her again the sublimity of Ms. Dillard’s language, but it also raised some questions for her about the writer’s separation from the human world, her utter disengagement from the urgent issues of her day.
“Have you read it recently?” Ms. Dungy asks a colleague who declares her own love for “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” “You might want to.” The world has turned since 1974.
The second time around, “Tinker Creek” raised some of the same issues for me. Reading it as a 62-year-old, it turns out, is entirely different from reading it as a language-besotted college student just learning that writing like Annie Dillard’s could exist in living time, as indelible as any line by Shakespeare or Keats or Dickinson.
The features of the book that make me cast a sideways glance today — the specific circumstances of privilege, or just the good luck, that make it possible for a young woman to feel confident wandering alone in even a suburb-skirting woodland, for instance — ought to have made me cast a sideways glance in 1980, too, though they did not. I was also a young woman who knew so little of the human world that I still felt safe walking alone in the wild one.
By 1992, Ms. Dillard was dismissing her own early work as “little, little, little books,” but they are still magnificent to me. Rereading “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” this spring, it was a relief to react to it in much the same way I reacted as a teenager. Reading it again, I am once more intoxicated with language, once more swept away by the violent, intertwined, unaccountable beauty of nature, deeply in love with the whole profligate living world. Reading it again, I am the girl I was then and the woman I am now. Both at once.