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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Clown Painting
In Chapter 1, Dillard describes a strange painting on the wall in her hotel room, “the sort of which you do not intend to look at, and which, alas, you never forget” (1). The painting of a clown, its features formed by a variety of produce—cabbage, carrots, string beans, parsley, chili peppers—lingers with Dillard long after she leaves the hotel. Though she goes on to have a profound experience viewing the total eclipse, the moment is almost overshadowed by the strangeness of this painting. Dillard writes:
Some tasteless fate presses it upon you; it becomes part of the complex interior junk you carry with you wherever you go. Two years have passed since the total eclipse of which I write. During those years I have forgotten, I assume, a great many things I wanted to remember—but I have not forgotten that clown painting or its lunatic setting in the old hotel (1).
Though the painting plays a small role in the essay, Dillard includes this moment as a reference to the strangeness of memory. The mind often creates strange associations between events of importance and sometimes mundane, sometimes bizarre people, places, or things connected to them. This strange quirk of memory can be comical, as with Dillard’s grotesque clown painting, but it can also be frustrating, as we never fully understand why the mind latches on to some details but obscures or erases others. The clown painting represents those useless details that stick in the mind for seemingly no reason, a phenomenon to which many can relate.
Palo Santo Trees
In Essay 6, “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” Dillard states that someday she would like to be reincarnated as a palo santo tree on the Galápagos Islands. Like many other tourists visiting the islands, Dillard is initially drawn to the vivaciousness of the sea lions. By comparison, the palo santo trees seem plain and unremarkable, and Dillard writes, “I had never given them a thought” (94). However, after Dillard leaves the islands and thinks back on her trip, the palo santo trees stick out the most in her mind. Eventually, she returns to the Galápagos specifically to see the trees. Dillard describes the trees in detail, noting their sparseness in comparison to the outpouring of life on the islands: “At every season they all look newly dead, pale and bare as birches drowned in a beaver pond—for at every season they look leafless, paralyzed, and mute” (95). Other creatures on the island may be more exotic or interesting, but the palo santo trees bear silent witness to everything going on around them.
In the rest of the essay, Dillard explains the connection between nature and silence and how she believes the two are innately intertwined: “The silence is all there is [....] it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings” (96). Though others might dismiss the trees for being plain and mute, Dillard suggests these qualities are their primary appeal. The trees can observe their surroundings more closely because nothing about them detracts from the goings-on of the world around them; their silence allows them to witness what they might otherwise miss. In wishing to be reincarnated as palo santo trees, Dillard symbolically demonstrates her quest to be a part of nature, to witness and understand it in a way that mankind finds difficult.
The Bicycle
In Essay 14, “Aces of Eights,” Dillard takes a weekend getaway with her younger self, a nine-year-old child, who finds a bicycle under their vacation cottage. Dillard describes preparing the bike to be ridden by the child, who later asks for some clothespins and playing cards so she can attach the cards to the spokes of the wheel to make a slapping noise while she rides.
This encounter represents Dillard actually riding the bike herself, allowing her inner child to decide how best to spend her time. Dillard recounts in the essay how her younger self feared growing older and losing the person she was in that moment. Dillard finding and riding an abandoned bicycle represents her attempt to reconnect with her childhood desires, to revive the childhood self that has since “died” as Dillard matured into adulthood. Later in the essay, Dillard uses the imagery of the bicycle to describe the passage of time as one ages, transitioning from childhood to adulthood: “But momentum propels you over the crest. Imperceptibly, you start down. When do the days start to blur and then, breaking your heart, the seasons? The cards click faster in the spokes; you pitch forward” (176). Though Dillard mourns for the child she was and does her best to keep her spirit alive, stopping the progress of time is ultimately as futile as attempting to stop a bike as it picks up speed going downhill. The bike simultaneously connects Dillard to her childhood self and represents the unstoppable progression of time.
Related Titles
By Annie Dillard
