SOURCE: "'Into the Bladelike Arms of God:' The Quest for Meaning through Symbolic Language in Thoreau and Annie Dillard," in Denver Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 2, Fall, 1985, pp. 103-16.

In the following essay, McConahay compares Henry David Thoreau's Walden to Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, noting that both writers focus on self in their efforts to explain the universe.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

                                      Thoreau, Walden

I propose to keep here what Thoreau called "a meteorological journal of the mind," telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to...