50 pages • 1 hour read
Annie DillardTeaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Essay 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Essay 1: “Total Eclipse”
Essay 1, Part 1 Summary
In 1979, Annie Dillard and her husband, Gary, travel to a small town near Yakima, Washington, to view the solar eclipse. In the hotel room, Dillard notices a hideous painting of a clown. Earlier in the day, while driving to the hotel, Dillard and Gary encounter a pass that has been blocked by an avalanche slide. Highway crews create a tunnel through the debris, and Dillard and Gary continue onward. In the hotel, Dillard sets the alarm for early in the morning.
Essay 1, Part 2 Summary
The next morning, Dillard and Gary drive into the countryside until they find a hillside overlooking Yakima Valley. Others begin to arrive and set up camp on the hillside. The eclipse begins, and Dillard describes its strangeness and wonder, which begins to evolve into a kind of temporary madness: “I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong” (8). Colors become inverted, commonplace things look supernatural and frightening, and people appear as though they are dead: “I looked at Gary. [...] Everything was lost. He was a platinum print, a dead artist’s version of life” (9). People on the hill begin screaming as it suddenly appears that part of the sky is detaching, and the sun is being covered up by something “enormous and black” that Dillard has trouble correlating with the moon, since it materializes “out of thin air—black, and flat, and sliding, outlined in flame” (11). For a moment, it feels as though the world is ending—as though everyone has died. The sky goes black, with only a ring of light left.
Essay 1, Part 3 Summary
Dillard now understands the terror that people must have felt seeing a solar eclipse without having a scientific understanding of it, since she comprehended the science but was still filled with fear. Dillard feels as though she was temporarily transported to a different world, a place almost impossible to describe with language. She again correlates the solar eclipse with entering the land of the dead: “The dead were parted one from the other and could no longer remember the faces and lands they had loved in the light” (15).
Essay 1, Part 4 Summary
Afterward, Dillard can’t remember arriving at a restaurant, where she and Gary encounter others who have been watching the eclipse. A college student compares the sight of the white sliver of sun to a “Life Saver” (16), a comment that brings Dillard out of her trance. The normalcy of the word, along with eating breakfast, return Dillard to the humdrum of life after the transcendent moment she has experienced. Dillard thinks over her experience and why it was so aweing and so terrifying. She marvels at people’s ability to go back to the daily grind after encountering such a moment of greatness: “From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home” (21).
Essay 1 Analysis
In her first essay, Dillard uses first-person, past-tense narration to describe her experience witnessing a solar eclipse. The encounter is transcendent, connecting Dillard to an ancient, almost primitive human experience in which science and reason take a backseat to feelings such as fear, awe, and wonder. She describes “the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us” but also notes that there are phenomena in the world that “our sciences cannot locate or name” (12). Though Dillard knows the scientific explanation for the solar eclipse, the sensations and emotions that the experience evokes in her prove difficult to fully process or explain.
Dillard has had years to think over the experience, as it occurred in 1978 and the essays were originally published in 1982, but she finds herself incapable of fully expressing what she encountered that day. On one hand, some of Dillard’s descriptions sound almost mundane, such as the idea of the sun being covered by “a lens cover, or the lid of a pot” (11). However, Dillard also references how completely terrifying the experience was, comparing the sight to seeing “a row of mushroom clouds rising on the horizon” and the feeling that civilization as we know it is over (12). Though Dillard uses a number of analogies to describe the experience, the overall feeling she ultimately returns to on a number of occasions is that of dying, which is how she opens the essay: “It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass [....] and into the region of dread” (1). Like death, Dillard suggests, seeing a solar eclipse is an experience that one cannot fully grasp unless one has experienced it.
Dillard is so moved by seeing the solar eclipse that afterward, she finds it difficult to return to any sort of normalcy. Dillard is initially taken aback to see just how quickly others bounce back from this profound event, though eventually she realizes this is one of the strange but wonderful characteristics of humanity. No matter how deep or weighty an experience might be, human beings can still be easily attracted by physical needs, such as food: “It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg” (17). Dillard continues to marvel over what she has witnessed, though she, too, feels relieved to return to her routine: “But enough is enough. One turns at last even from the glory itself with a sigh of relief” (21). Human beings like these brief encounters with the magnificent and the divine, Dillard argues, but ultimately, we prefer the mundane and day-to-day since it is what we know best.
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By Annie Dillard
