Last week when I was in a slump laying on the porch I reread my journal from a year ago. Often reaching back in my notes gives me perspective on the nature of cycles in my life. But last week it only sank me deeper into my inner workings of doubt. A conversation with a friend sent me looking for an old blog post about materials. In those previously thought out words and images I found several ideas worth revisiting.
In today ‘s New York Times Margaret Renkle wrote about Annie Dillard’s The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek which was published fifty years ago. My mother gave me a paperback copy for my birthday in 1976. When my daughter was in college she read my copy which was still on my shelf at my parents’ loft in Manhattan. Zoë added her own mix of post-it notes and marginalia inside its covers. And, as always, there was a postcard in my mother’s handwriting tucked into the first chapters as a bookmark. During the spring of 2009 I listened to an audio version–actually the first time I read it in its entirety– and found the language inspiring. It created a triangle: one point referenced my life in Virginia, one point represented my daughter’s interest in Dillard’s words, and the third was my mother’s poetic influence on my sensibility.
In the 2009 summer solstice project I used Dillard as a source of quotes to accompany many of the images. In each year’s incarnation of this project it is instructive to revisit earlier ones, to spiral forward intoxicated with language remembering the girl I was, the mother I became, and today’s current point of vision.
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.
–Margaret Renkle, I Reread a Book That Changed My Life, but I’d Changed, Too, New York Times, June 3, 2024