I set my coffee beside me on the curb I smell loam on the wind I pat the puppy I watch the mountain. At my back the sun is setting – how can I not have noticed before that the sun is setting? My mind has been a blank slab of black asphalt for hours, but that doesn’t stop the sun’s wild wheel. Overhead, great strips and chunks of cloud dash to the northwest in a gold rush. I have never seen anything so tremulous and live. Before me extends a low hill trembling in yellow brome, and behind the hill, filling the sky, rises an enormous mountain ridge, forested, alive and awesome with brilliant blown lights. I have hazarded into a new corner of the world, an unknown spot, a Brigadoon.

The road is vacant, the interstate is out of sight and out of earshot. Perhaps my still slightly sickly state has been an influence, but I had that experience on reading a passage in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and I make no apology for quoting it in full now:

And if it does you know you’re onto something, though you might not know what, and you read it again and go back and feel that delicious stirring thrill each time and you know that book will live with you for forever. Perhaps it is just a matter of timing, that you’ve achieved just the right blend of vulnerability, receptiveness and desire and the writer has put together the words in just the right order, with the right emphasis and tone that it simply resonates and you have to break for a moment to recover from the wonderful shock then read it again, tentatively in case it doesn’t work on second reading, or in case it does.

There are moments in reading that catch you just so, that transform a book into an experience.

Pilgrim at tinker creek review