I Reread a Book That Changed My Life, but I’d Changed, Too

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.