James Baquet

    I have always been a fan of the “little book.” I don’t mean little in size; some little books can have a lot of pages. I mean a book that makes no earth-shaking observations, that changes nothing when it’s published, that just gives us a peek inside a thoughtful writer’s mind.

    Thoreau’s “Walden” is such a book, and not coincidentally, Annie Dillard, who wrote “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” wrote her college thesis about “Walden.” “Pilgrim” is a 20th-century, female-centered take on the same kinds of things Thoreau wrote about, though with a keener sense of nature, and far less social agitation. Thoreau, after all, also wrote the book “Civil Disobedience,” which, as the inspiration for both Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., shook the world in innumerable ways.

    The purpose of the book, she says on her website, was to “describe the creator, if any, by studying creation,” something which Thoreau did not attempt to do. As a result, one reviewer called Dillard “one of the foremost horror writers of the 20th Century.” Dillard considered that comment “wonderful.”

    Here’s a quote:

    “...The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating 32 feet per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”

    The book has 15 chapters divided into four “seasons.” While Dillard intended them as a continuous narrative, each chapter can be read as a discrete essay.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. version (of)

    2. unfolded, opened up

    3. unable to be counted

    4. separate, distinct

    5. on purpose, intrinsically connected

    6. riddle, difficult problem or question

    7. sharper, more piercing

    8. extremely important, consequential

    9. without care

    10. branch, as on a tree