Portions of Annie Dillard’s writing in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek convinced me that nature is more than just beautiful landscapes unaffected by human invasion and fascinating undomesticated animals; it is also the ugly parts. The parts we don’t want to think, let alone know, about. The aspects of it that are disturbing to the morals of human consciousness. This is done mostly through her chapter, “Fecundity” where she goes into gruesome detail on the mating, birthing, and parent-child murder for survival that takes place in nature. Whether intentional or not, Annie Dillard changed some of my thinking on nature where I once found it to all be pretty and happy, maybe some violence within the animal kingdom but that’s just food-chain stuff. Now it’s been twisted into the not-so-pleasant.
Even in cities where one has to search for the natural elements, Dillard points out where it can be found and how it isn’t a fun thing to know. On page 167 she says of New York, “Apartment houses are hives of swarming roaches. Or again: in one sense you could think of Manhattan’s land as high-rent, high-rise real estate; in another sense you could see it as an enormous breeding ground for rats, acres and acres of rats.” EW. But it doesn’t stop there. The rest of the chapter is an abundant collection of various living things that breed and feed, such as the wasps on page 169 that multiply and feed on a host body. Or another example is the lacewings that eat their own eggs as they’re laying them if they decide they’re hungry. Turn around, nibble on some eggs, lay some more. That’s a sick image. The worst of these is when she describes a lioness licking its cub before absentmindedly eating it alive. That was a really hard image to cope with.
It isn’t just in this chapter, though. My mind started to wonder if nature is as pretty and delicate as I once thought it was on page one. Annie Dillard had a cat, which is great because I adore cats of all varieties. However this cat was not sweet and fragile like my own at home. Her cat came in smelling like blood and urine, even leaving bloody paw prints around. I know that cats are meant to be outside and that they are predators, however I’ve never visualized them as such. Her cat came off to me as dirty, undesirable even. I would not want that cat cuddling me in the middle of the night smelling as it did and leaving such stains as it wandered. Which is confusing for me, personally, because I am a huge advocate for animals. So even her simple description of her cat, not meant to offend anyone, had me thinking that maybe everything isn’t as innocent as I was pretending it was.
It’s interesting that you notice a sort of disparity between what you know to be true and what you imagine to be. At the end here, you say you were pretending, which indicates that at some level you already knew that nature was more than just flowers blooming and beautiful sunsets, etc., but that you chose to see it in that way. It’s cool that one can see all of these things and still decide how they want to see it. So, at the end of it all, do you still see your cat as cute and cuddly?