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 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Essay 7: “On a Hill Far Away”
Essay 7 Summary
In Virginia, Dillard puts a lamb in the oven and decides to go for a walk. Near sunset, she goes up a high grassy hill near Tinker Creek, where she sees a fenced horse barn with a dun mare and a new foal. A little boy plays out front. Dillard asks the little boy about the foal, and she notices he has a peculiar way of speaking: “Who calls his father ‘Father’?” (99). The boy asks Dillard if she knows the Lord as her personal savior, and Dillard realizes she met his mother about a year before. Back then, Dillard approached the house from the opposite direction and asked the woman if she could walk through her property. The woman asked her the same question as the boy and then told Dillard about her church, offering Dillard pamphlets to take home.
The boy seems pleased that Dillard knows his mother, and he strikes up further conversation with her. Dillard realizes he’s lonely, which is why he keeps talking to her. He tells her about a time he stepped on a snake, and Dillard thinks he’s making it up at first, only to belatedly realize he’s telling the truth: “[...] but there was no way now to respond to his story all over again, identically but sincerely” (106). They part ways, even though Dillard can tell the little boy wants her to stay; she needs to get home to take the lamb out of the oven.
Essay 7 Analysis
In Essay 7, Dillard describes her brief encounter with a local boy who at first strikes her as being odd, maybe even disingenuous. Dillard notes the strangeness of the way the boy looks and speaks: “He looked like a 19th-century cartoon of an Earnest Child. This kid is a fraud, I thought” (99). Though Dillard can see he sincerely wants her company, probably due to loneliness or boredom, she suspects that he puts on affectations in the way he speaks to her: “He was smiling, warming up for a little dialect, being a kid in a book” (104). When the boy begins telling Dillard about stepping on a snake, Dillard assumes that he must be enhancing or even making up the story to get her attention. She responds accordingly: “‘Gee,’ I kept saying, ‘you must have been scared’” (104). However, Dillard soon realizes the details of the boy’s story suggest he is probably telling the truth. Belatedly, she realizes that she has been the one to behave insincerely, responding to his story with forced enthusiasm, when she would probably have been genuinely interested in his story if she’d believed him all along.
The two part ways, failing to connect, though both have attempted at different points to do so. This seemingly insignificant encounter suggests a problem in human-to-human connection that does not happen in Dillard’s human-to-nature experiences. Both she and the boy play parts and try to be what they think the other wants them to be, rather than behaving authentically. In doing so, they both miss the opportunity to establish a true connection, and the encounter will remain just a brief, passing moment between them with little long-term consequence.
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By Annie Dillard
