Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard

Dillard’s opening anecdote of the old fighting tom leaping through the window onto her bed at night and kneading her chest while she’s half-asleep is borrowed from someone else. But the reaction to the event is pure Dillard as poet and theologian. 

“I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. 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. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign or the Passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence . . . ‘Seems like we’re just set down here,” a woman said to me recently, “and don’t nobody know why.”

In this opening, Dillard poses the question of the book very colloquially. Seems like we’re just set down here and don’t nobody know why. The opening also puts the reader on notice that her writing style is going to be poetic. She’s going to use words that need to be paused over and considered. And she’s going to use them abundantly in sentences with rhythm and repetition that convey feeling as much as they convey meaning. And she’s going to make lots of allusions to Scripture (just give a second glance to the quotation above as an example).

In her younger years, Dillard had turned away from organized religion because she couldn’t reconcile the easy, pious answers about Why? with the suffering she observed in the world. But in her mid-twenties, Dillard dared take a crack at answering the question of Why? herself. And she won the Pulitzer for her efforts. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the young poet took on the absolutely biggest question of all, suspecting it was impossible to answer, but daring to try.

In her year-long, up-close observation of nature along Tinker Creek, Dillard does her best to show us “here” (as in Seems like we’re just set down here . . .) in blinding color, shifting shadow, ice and heat, big and small. Animal, vegetable, mineral. She serves up details of nature both adorable (the juvenile muskrat floating past with his feet over his stomach) and ghoulish. She observes the abundance of the natural world as something not altogether positive (all those parasites and predators). And trying to draw a conclusion about the nature of God from all this, she concludes merely “the creator loves pizzazz.” –which, honestly, made me laugh. And reminded me of the Psalmist claiming God made the great leviathan just for fun.

In her poetic, abundant way, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard show us nature in which the Creator must be because He is omnipresent, so He has to be in there, right? 

But questions linger. 

And in her later book, Holy the Firm, Dillard tries to answer them. That book was written while she lived on Lummi Island, off mainland Washington, where nature is sparse. She called Lummi Island “the edge of the known and comprehended world . . . the western rim of the real . . . the fringes’ edge . . . where time and eternity spatter each other with foam—a place, in other words, where nature stops and the darkness of Divinity begins.” Or, put more succinctly: “If God is in the abundance of creation, take away creation and get a better look at God.” Or, put a bit more esoterically, perhaps Creation was the fall.

Dillard invites us on a pilgrimage to understand God. But she also quotes Augustine: “If you do understand, then it is not God.” 

Or as Anne Lamott prays at the beginning of her day: Whatever.

Seems like we’re just set down here, and don’t nobody know why.— Sharelle Moranville

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Considered by critics to be Cather’s best work, Death Comes for the Archbishop is a full-color portrait of the southwestern United States, especially New Mexico, and its people in the second half of the 19^th century. As she has done in other books, Cather catches a culture on the cusp of huge change—the “new” world pushes against the “old,” indigenous religions fight to maintain their beliefs while integrating with Catholicism, the strength and beauty of nature begins to face those who want to control it. The Americans are pitted against the French, the Spanish, the Indians, the Mexicans, although it is not clear who, in this context, actually is an American.

At the center of the story are two French missionaries, Jean Marie Latour and his good friend and assistant Joseph Vaillant. Their lives mirror the men on whom they are based: Latour on the first bishop of New Mexico, Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Vaillant on the first bishop of Colorado, Joseph Projectus Machebeuf.

Latour is sophisticated, thoughtful, and cool. Vaillant, who is a few steps beyond homely, is warm and engaging, enthusiastic about raising funds for missions and, ultimately, for the bishop’s dream: the cathedral. The two men are yin and yang, each showing strengths that combat the other’s weaknesses. Vaillant helps Latour establish himself in a land in which priests have been settled for hundreds of years, although those priests have been on their own, with no oversight from Rome, and they've created their own rules, or lack of them. They flagrantly take advantage of the local people and grow ostentatiously wealthy while living a life of pleasure, marrying, having children, and building a bit of a family business. Latour carefully and slowly forces the errant priests out of their parishes, and Vaillant is there to care for the parishioners, wherever or however he finds them.

The book is episodic, less like a novel and more like a series of short stories tied together by the missionaries and some continuing characters. Kit Carson plays a prominent role and, through him, Cather shows this country’s relationship with its earliest settlers, the Indians. Carson is married to an Indian and, in most cases, he acts like their friend. Yet, when the U.S. government wants to find a hideout where the Navajos stay safe, Carson leads the troops right there, causing the death of more than 100, and leading to the death of their way of life. Cather offers a poignant overview of that way of life:

They seemed to have none of the European's desire to "master" nature, to arrange and re-create. They spent their ingenuity in the other direction; in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves. This was not so much from indolence, the Bishop thought, as from an inherited caution and respect. It was as if the great country were asleep, and they wished to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse. 

Perhaps the biggest contrast Cather creates is between the first chapter and the rest of the book. In that initial chapter, she introduces us to "three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America," in an opulent villa overlooking Rome. The four men are fed exceptionally well and drink fine champagne, which feeds the Cardinals' already overblown egos. They are committed to sending more missionaries to America but are not interested in the least in learning just what America is or who its people are and assume Indians all live in wigwams. Their evening ends over brandy and a sunset. These cardinals wouldn't last a half hour in the territory to which they are sending missionaries, nor would their arrogant attitudes achieve many converts.

Characters throughout the book are compelling, real, and beautifully flawed, but the exquisite scenery is the real star, and Cather captures that with breathtaking clarity; the book is full of a love of the land and with descriptions that take the fine hand of a master.  Perhaps her most-quoted description:

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere anthills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky.

Death finally comes for the archbishop, after he has lived a long and full life. When one of his friends shows his obvious grief and wants to heal him from what looks and sounds like pneumonia, Latour simply says, 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.” —Pat Prijatel

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

This book accomplishes several things at once.  It gives us superbly researched accounts of three intriguing stories that peaked in the first decade of the 1900s – the familiar career of Theodore Roosevelt, the less known path of William Howard Taft, and the misunderstood investigative journalism of that period.  It shows how these three stories entwined with each other and fed each other.  It gives us a comprehensive feel for a period that echoes our own in many ways.  It is a long but wonderfully readable work of history.  

Teddy Roosevelt was a huge and energetic personality, a scholar, a prodigious reader and writer, and a man dedicated to progressive domestic policies but flawed by an impetuous temperament and muscularly nationalistic foreign policies.  After some initial political success, personal tragedy triggered a depression that he conquered by physical activity during an extended ranching sabbatical.  He returned to the meteoric political career we are familiar with.  In just over a decade he served as a reforming U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, New York City Police Commissioner, Governor of New York, Vice-President and President of the United States.  Goodwin gives us well-documented explanations of why and how he achieved a number of progressive social policies in each position.  

Goodwin gives us a welcome picture of Big Bill Taft.  We typically know him as an oversized president who was the regular Republican Party nominee in 1912, opposing Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” campaign that allowed Woodrow Wilson’s campaign as the Democratic nominee to win.  But the full story is far more vibrant and impressive.  He was a popular and productive public servant in Ohio, especially in judicial service, which was his own preferred path.  He developed a close personal friendship with Roosevelt while working at the Justice Department; Roosevelt and Taft’s wife kept pushing him in political directions.  He served admirably as the first Governor General of the Philippines and the leader of Roosevelt’s cabinet.  He was a natural choice, and Roosevelt’s choice, to succeed TR in 1908.  Somewhat trivial bureaucratic squabbles during Taft’s presidency produced a serious division between them that led to Roosevelt’s third-party run in 1912.  Touchingly that rift was healed in 1918, shortly before Roosevelt’s death and Taft’s eventual appointment as Chief Justice of the United States.  

The rise of investigative journalism in the 1890s and 1900s is the third story Goodwin tells.  An increasingly educated and urban America provided a market for more thoughtful and probing journalism than daily newspapers could provide.  Goodwin introduces us to McClure’s, a monthly led by S.S. McClure and featuring well-researched articles by writers such as Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White.  Despite their documentation of social issues with high standards of scholarly journalism, these writers were often included in the maligned category of muckrakers and yellow-press. 

Roosevelt was the perfect foil for these writers.  He invited them into his thinking, and in return used the relationship to project his policies, and not incidentally his personality, to the general public.  This relationship of press and politics gave Roosevelt the Bully Pulpit of the title.  It was unprecedented in American government but has become a necessity for successful governance ever since, and continues so with the evolution of the press to broadcast and electronic media.  Taft’s inability to understand and use this resource – due to his personal temperament and his judicial approach to public leadership – was a major barrier to his presidency and to his 1912 campaign.  

The period echoes themes of our own times.  Economic growth since the Civil Wat resulted in extremes of wealth and poverty, and the political divisions were equally extreme.  Industrial powerhouses of that day – railroads, oil companies, and meat packers – were eventually tamed, income taxation was introduced, popular election of senators was adopted, and labor and housing conditions were addressed.  Goodwin shows how these accomplishments were the result of Roosevelt’s political skill, breaking legislative deadlocks by using the press to apply public pressure 

It is an extensively documented period of history.  People still wrote meaningful letters and left thoughtful diaries.  Public documents are generally preserved.  Goodwin has distilled these resources to tell powerful stories, full of credible and nuanced characters, motivated by strong beliefs and purposes.  One member of our group stated that the book should be read by any current Republican as a reminder of what the party once stood for.  — William H. Smith Jr.