(Note: Dillard, who died September 15, 2026, published Pilgrim – set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia – in 1975 and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. I first read it within the next couple of years. As full admission, this discussion leaves so much out that I encourage you to read the book and to seek out the numerous reviews done over the past 50 years.)
I’ve now spent the last month re-reading, or maybe re-chewing this phenomenal book.
Until its arrival, my education of nature and its power of suggestion to the poetic, the philosophic, and the divine was found in Thoreau’s Walden which I am now just rereading. (Ok, a brief nod to the Psalms as well.)Thoreau writes with an almost detached (albeit deeply intellectual) skepticism toward man, God, and nature. On the other hand, Dillard’s emotions are deeply embedded in Pilgrim so that the same topics are not for armchair contemplation, but for living out. As one example, she sits next to a poisonous diamondback watching a mosquito feeding on it and ponders the life of the parasite and the tolerance of the host toward it. After such a setup, I half expect the rest to be a bit folkloric… Yet she dives deep, into the poetic, the philosophical, and the theological, and it’s more fun than Thoreau.
Dillard’s entomological chops are also deep. Besides her own observations, scientific and otherwise, she uses legitimate sources freely and often in describing a fact of nature. She covers hundreds of species of bugs, birds, fish, and waterfowl with full-throatiness. (Melville and Powers would approve.) This approach arrives at a stick with two sharp ends: on one end, nature is brutal beyond belief, on the other end, nature is bountiful and beautiful. Here, then, enters the metaphysical.
Every writer could benefit from reading Pilgrim for its prose and vocabulary alone (I would also recommend her book The Writing Life.) I’m not talking about the names of bugs, which, again, are legion and the result of actual, factual research. I’m talking about the poetic, the philosophic, and the theological that spring out of unlikely places where the beauty and brutality of nature are examined. Here’s one more particularly poignant example: upon finding a beautiful, small green frog on a leaf in the creek she witnessed a giant water bug that impaled it to “slowly liquidize its insides and sip its life away.” That will get your attention if nothing else will. So the bug and the frog are but one more example of hundreds of observations of nature and its non-vindictive brutality. Meanwhile, nature’s beauty shows through as light seems to arise out of nowhere and illuminate her mind against the mountains, the clattering water of Tinker Creek, and a back yard cedar tree where it often returns and is meaningful at a depth I have yet to fully plumb.
So where is God, where is philosophy, and what can be poetic in any case? It’s there in a phrase or a sentence – stashed between a river of words describing the otherwise insignificant events flowing down Tinker Creek – as the place from which all of life’s intellectual, emotional, and spiritual matter may be pondered.
As a final nod to bugs, Dillard has convinced me that the next time I spread a picnic blanket in a green pasture, I’ll be sitting atop a billion beings such as, bugs, moles, mice, rabbits, and one or two celled creatures so numerous they cannot be numbered and so small as to need a microscope to see that they are, in fact, alive. The collective beneath my blanket exists together, feeding on each other, parasites and parasites of parasites. The simple natural order? Or a parasitic metaphor we’d rather not contemplate? It’ll be for you to make that call.
Yet still, if we could sit with Dillard on that blanket, she might just swear we need nothing more than Omar’s Rubaiyat:
A book of Verses underneath the Bough / A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou
And if asked for something deeper, she might just smile and return to the verse:
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
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