I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’sĪn anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. This morning it was a wood duck, down at the creek. I dress in a hurry, imagining the yard flapping with auks, or flamingos. If I’m lucky I might be jogged awake by a strange bird call. I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing. The cat and our rites are gone and my life is changed, but the memory remains of something powerful playing over me.
Things are tamer now I sleep with the window shut. I still think of that old tomcat, mornings, when I wake. But the air hardens your skin you stand you leave the lighted shore to explore some dim headland, and soon you’re lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing. You remember pressure, and a curved sleep you rested against, soft, like a scallop in its shell. ” These are morning matters, pictures you dream as the final wave heaves you up on the sand to the bright light and drying air. “Seem like we’re just set down here,” a woman said to me recently, “and don’t nobody know why. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence…. I never 4 / Annie Dillard knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood I looked as though I’d been painted with roses. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood.
HERACLITUS Contents Epigraph 1 Heaven and Earth in Jest iii 3 2 Seeing 16 3 Winter 37 4 The Fixed 55 5 Untying the Knot 73 6 The Present 78 7 Spring 105 8 Intricacy 124 9 Flood 149 10 Fecundity 161 11 Stalking 184 12 Nightwatch 209 13 The Horns of the Altar 225 14 Northing 247 15 The Waters of Separation 265 Afterword 278 More Years Afterward 283 About Annie Dillard 285 About the Author Other Books By Annie Dillard Cover CopyrightĪbout the Publisher Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 1 Heaven and Earth in Jest I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest.
Annie dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for Richard It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.
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