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 9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Essay 9: “Life on the Rocks: The Galápagos”
Essay 9, Part 1 Summary
Dillard writes of the difficulty of conceiving there being a universe of nothing that eventually formed into something, so she compares this process to “a limitless slosh of sea” and the matter as “volcanic lava [...] hardening mute and intractable on nothing’s lapping shore” (113), creating a series of islands like the Galápagos. Dillard describes her fascination with the rocks on the Galápagos Islands, noting that they are worth the trip alone, even though they are also “animal gardens” home to a variety of creatures, some of which exist nowhere else in the world. Dillard admires various animals on the islands, and she marvels at the tameness of the animals, though she keeps her distance: “We people don’t walk up and pat each other; enough is enough” (117). The sea lions on the island are particularly sociable, surrounding people while they swim, playing games, and resting against Dillard to nap. Dillard notes that not many people come to the Galápagos and that very few people live there, though she describes Alf Kastdalen, the owner of a 400-acre farm, and his house full of books.
Essay 9, Part 2 Summary
Dillard writes about Charles Darwin’s relationship to the Galápagos Islands, including his first visit at age 26 that eventually led to him writing On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. Dillard describes how Darwin’s ideas have evolved into Neo-Darwinism and how they have been tested and challenged by new ideas. She also notes the Fundamentalist Christian objection to Darwinism: “Tragically, these people feel they have to make a choice between the Bible and modern science” (124). Social Darwinism suggests that the “fittest” are those who make the most money and power, and philosophers and modern-day Protestants and Catholics account for Darwin’s ideas by merging them with beliefs they already hold. Dillard suggests, “Like flatworms, like languages, ideas evolve” (126), and she says that Darwin introduced new ideas to the world and propelled discoveries that forced us to see ourselves in new lights.
Essay 9, Part 3 Summary
Darwin’s finches inspired much of his discovery because of their variations in beaks. During Dillard’s own visit, she is surprised by how easily the finches come when she calls, no matter which island she is on. The finches are not remarkable in terms of color or size, but their beaks have modified from island to island based on needs. Dillard notes that like the finches, “everything else on earth” evolved in isolation (128). If the Galápagos Islands were united, “there would be one dull note, one super-dull finch” (130).
Essay 9, Part 4 Summary
Dillard carries this concept further, positing that in the most extreme, “If the earth were one unified island, a smooth ball, we would all be one species, a tremulous muck” (130). Isolation forces creatures apart, so that species don’t intermix and interbreed. Because of that phenomenon, Dillard believes, “Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth” (131). Because humans have “blown back together like the finches” thanks to advances in technology (131), it is more difficult to trace the isolation in which different members of our species evolved. Bodies of water kept us apart, but so did rocks, an observation that leads Dillard to conclude, “It is all, God help us, a matter of rocks” (131). Mountain ridges kept species apart, and different climates produced different results. These things continue to shift, but ultimately, “[...] the rocks shape life, and then life shapes life, and the rocks are moving,” and thus, Dillard concludes, “life shapes the rocks” (133).
Dillard believes that living creatures have as much impact on the land as the land does on the creatures: “Softness is vulnerable, but it has a will” (134). Those creatures include those like man who dam rivers, plant crops, and otherwise impact the landscape. Dillard suggests the world is interconnected in a “bright snarl” that will keep changing and evolving. The Galápagos Islands make this very apparent: “It’s all still happening there, in real light” (135).
Essay 9 Analysis
Dillard touches on many ideas in this essay, but one of the overarching themes is the interconnected relationship between rocks and living things. Dillard uses the term “rocks” to speak more broadly about the earth—mountains, dirt, valleys, terrain. Beginning her essay with the metaphor of the creation of the universe simulating ocean waves encountering lava to create islands, Dillard establishes the importance of rocks to life, going on to explain that living creatures began to populate these rocks: “There were blue-green algae; there were tortoises” (113).
Dillard suggests that geography and geology have both had a major impact on the way that living creatures shift and evolve, since the varying habitats on Earth dictate so much of how a species evolves: “Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth” (130). A creature born on a mountaintop will develop differently from one born in a valley; the landscape “shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water” (130). Geography and geology play an important role, too, because things like mountain ranges and oceans prevent certain species from interbreeding, simply because the landscape prevents them from finding one another. Using the example of mallard and pintail ducks, Dillard explains, “They live apart, so they don’t mate” (130). Rocks, then, have a significant impact on living creatures, determining how they breed and evolve.
Dillard also argues that living creatures have a bigger impact on the landscape than has previously been acknowledged: “The completed picture needs one more element: life shapes the rocks” (133). Dillard describes creatures like tube worms, coral atolls, lichens, and trees that impact the landscape around them, noting, “Each live thing wags its home waters, rumples the turf, rearranges the air” (134). Though Dillard names various living species within the essay, including iguanas, finches, and sea lions, the species she describes the most in their relationship to the land is humans. Dillard details her own experiences on the Galápagos Islands, as well as other visitors from history—like sailors, pirates, and settlers—who have passed through the islands. She describes specific individuals, like Alf Katsdalen, who live and farm on the islands, and she gives more generic examples of mankind’s impact on Earth, “damming the rivers, planting the plains, drawing in his mind’s eye dotted lines between the stars” (133-34).
Every living creature has some impact on the rocks, just as the rocks impact every living creature in some way, and Dillard argues further that even the terrain is not as stable as we believe it to be: “The mountains are no more fixed than the stars” (133). With plates shifting and new land forming and everything always in flux, Dillard suggests that everything on Earth is constantly evolving—animals, trees, rocks, water, humans, and even ideas.
Dillard uses the Galápagos Islands as a central point to focus this discussion, since the Galápagos are so tied to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Dillard notes that the term “evolution” conjures many different ideas and responses, perhaps most notably the dismay about our ancestors “effecting a literal, nimble descent from some liana-covered tree to terra firma, scratching themselves, and demanding bananas” (124). However, Dillard encourages us not to be fearful or complacent in approaching the concept of evolution, since we cannot learn or grow when we are “hardened final forms” but should aim rather to be like “the softest plasmic germs in a cell’s heart, in the nub of a word’s root, in the supple flux of an open mind” (126). Exploring what is unknown, Dillard argues, can lead to progress—like discoveries by Albert Einstein and other scientists—that help us glimpse what previously was unknowable.
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