Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, died Tuesday. She was 81. Her obituary in the Washington Post, described her as a “bard of the environment, a 20th-century Henry David Thoreau, a youthful sibyl of the wildwoods, a visionary whose shimmering prose offered glimpses of the eternal.” The New York Times obituary describes her “as a young American writer [who] walked into the woods and came out with a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the wonders and horrors of creation, the modern classic “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”

I loved Annie Dillard’s writing and my journals are filled with quotes from her books. In Teaching a Stone to Talk, Dillard related the story of a man who shot an eagle out of the sky and when he found it, the dry skull of a weasel was fixed by the jaws to the eagle’s throat. Dillard’s lesson here is recorded in one of my journals:

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.

Several of my beloveds knew of my love of Dillard and gifted me with a couple of her books. This is the inscription in An American Childhood:

One of my favorite passages from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age.”* This is what we know. The rest is gravy.

I learned of Dillard’s death from Adrienne, who called knowing that I would be saddened. One of the things I told her was what I’ve been telling her for the last several weeks, “The wrong people are dying.” Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan . . . .” And now, Annie Dillard. With all apologies to this late visionary, the great dog Death has come for the wrong people. This is what I know. The rest is not gravy.

*From the poem, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” by Dylan Thomas

The top post photograph (like the other photos in this post) is of Beaver Dam Creek — my Tinker Creek — February 2025.