Pilger am Tinker Creek

Inspired by Henry David Thoreau's Walden, 27-year-old Annie Dillard retreats to the Virginia Blue Mountains in the early 1970s to closely study the diverse manifestations of nature and to let the wonder of observation affect her, in order to "come to her senses again," as Thoreau once urged. Starting from the realization that "the detail" is the first and "visible fact of the world," she undertakes daily hikes along the wooded banks of Tinker Creek, observing and describing the changing light and the essence of the wind, the lives of muskrats and grasshoppers, the beauty of fish swimming upstream, and that of a water droplet under the microscope. Guided by the question of the intentions of a creative force that reveals and conceals itself in this natural spectacle, her precise observations connect.