Summary

In this essay Dillard explores the intricacies in the world around her. She does not venture out into Tinker Creek in this essay, but rather the “setting” is her mind and reveries with a telescope. Specifically, she focuses on describing the intricacies in the design of her goldfish’s fins, the life in a drop of algae from the fishbowl, the pines outside, dragonfly nymphs that litter Tinker Creek and she even wonders about the blood whirling in her fingers. From the world she knows, she starts ruminating on the intricacies in design in species she has read and heard about like the African Hercules Beetle and honey ants from South America.

In Part II of the essay, Dillard shifts her focus from description of all that is intricate to philosophizing about the creation of the intricate. She recalls facts and figures about how...