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 10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Essay 10: “A Field of Silence”
Essay 10 Summary
Dillard describes her time spent living on a farm on an island off the Washington coast. Dillard loves her time there, finding solace in tending the animals and belonging to something that feels “eternal in the crude way the earth does—extending, that is, a very long time” (137). One morning, Dillard leaves the house in the hopes of seeing the owners of the place she is renting, under the premise of going outside to listen to the rooster. The rooster makes his loud morning ruckus, joined by other roosters on other farms nearby. As Dillard looks out over the pastures, she suddenly feels a strange silence overcome the world; the pastures seem to become surrealistic versions of themselves, “monstrous, impeccable, as if they were holding their breaths” (139). Animals, plants, and people alike seem to stop as if “stuck,” “stricken and self-conscious” (139). Flies continue buzzing nearby, but Dillard herself feels “tall and vertical, in a blue shirt, self-conscious, and wishing to die” (140), as she and the rooster stare at one another, frozen.
Dillard hears whistling coming from another farm up the road and sees a woman pushing her wheelbarrow, though even sight this doesn’t break the trance: “Something had unhinged the world. The houses and roadsides and pastures were buckling under the silence” (140). Dillard believes she is witnessing something God-sent, but she turns away, not ready, and the sensation passes. Later, Dillard surprises herself by telling a friend, “There are angels in those fields” (142). Dillard has never thought about angels before, but now she believes she had an encounter with them in those fields: “There are angels in those fields, and, I presume, in all fields, and everywhere else” (144).
Essay 10 Analysis
In Essay 10, Dillard has an encounter with the divine that changes her perception of God. Before this time, Dillard believed that encountering something holy would be a glorious and beautiful experience, but Dillard’s brush with what she believes to be angels proves to be frightening, disorienting, and lonely: “That there is loneliness here I had granted, in the abstract—but not, I thought, inside the light of God’s presence, inside his sanction, and signed by his name” (138). At first, Dillard does not understand what is happening to her, experiencing the interaction with the divine as a silence, and one that carries force behind it: “[...] the silence gathered and struck me. It bashed me broadside from the heavens above me” (139).
Looking back, Dillard believes that she was being offered a chance to see something holy, but she cannot withstand the force of it: “I had to turn away” (142). This encounter with angels echoes some of the ideas in Essay 2, “An Expedition to the Pole,” in which Dillard argues that people have become far too complacent in their journey to seek God. The power of God is not something to be summoned lightly, but something to be held in awe and treated with caution and respect. Similarly, the divinity of God is not something to be grasped easily, but something that humans find difficult to face; Dillard herself experiences “paralysis” in the presence of the eternal. In this essay and others, Dillard describes places like the farm that are connected to nature as “crude” and “old,” inspiring and unknowable, much like her experiences with God and divinity. It is only in being in a place such as the farm, so intimately connected with nature, that Dillard could have such an experience and get a glimpse of “eternity’s outpost in time” (140).
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By Annie Dillard
