Annie Dillard’s novel, Teaching a Stone to Talk is comprised of essays written about herself, pertaining to events and things she has witnessed in her lifetime. She talks about places she has gone, for example, in her first essay, “Total Eclipse,” she writes about a trip she took with her husband where they say the sun eclipse. In addition, she talks about things she sees, for example, in “Living like Weasels,” she talks about the appearance and characteristics of a weasel. Though she talks about simplistic things, she uses vivid imagery and detail to tell her stories.
In her essay, “An Expedition to the Pole,” she starts off describing the singing group that she is seeing in her Catholic mass that day. She could have just left it at telling the readers the group name, The Wildflowers, but she chooses to elaborate further on what she is seeing. She goes on to write, “the lead is a tall, square-jaw teen-age boy, buoyant and glad to be here. He carries a guitar; he plucks out a little bluesy riff and hits some chords. With him are the rest of the Wildflowers.” By describing him and what he is doing in the moment, Dillard is allowing the readers to see what she is seeing, and to feel as if they are right there in the room with her. For me, as a reader, I find it easier to understand the story and relate to it if there is great description. I feel like I am a part of the narrative and I am living it as if it is happening to me. Later in the essay, she begins to describe the room, after telling the audience that she has only been going to Catholic mass for a year. She writes, “week after week I was moved by the pitiable-ness of the bare linoleum-floored sacristy which no flowers could cheer or soften, by the terrible singing I so loved, by the fatigued Bible readings, the lagging emptiness and dilution of the liturgy, the horrifying vacuity of the sermon, and by the fog of dreary senselessness pervading the whole..” Here, she not only describes what the room physically looked like, but she also described the vibe and emotion that was circling the room. I feel like she is almost mocking the Catholic masses, since she chose to use words such as “emptiness and dilution” and “dreary senselessness.” I think that she believes that the people that follow these masses are almost like puppets or robots, blindly following something that in reality, is not that great. However, she is doing the same thing and is falling into the trance that they themselves have been put into.
A second essay that she uses this vivid imagery and detail in is “Mirages.” According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a mirage is an image that is produced by hot air of something that seems to be far away, but really does not exist. I think her choosing to title one of her essays this is an interesting choice, giving that she uses so much imagery in her writing. It is a contradiction to why she uses so much detail, being that the images she produces are real life, they are what she is really seeing, however, a mirage is an optical illusion. It is almost as if she is saying that the things she sees are not real. In this essay, she talks about staying in a cabin on the water in Canada during a summer. She writes, “yesterday I stood on the beach and watched two light shows at once. It was fair and calm and hot; I faced a string of islands to the west. To the south I saw, spanning a wide channel between islands, a long crescendo-shaped warp, into which innocent little sailboats would wander and be wholly transformed into things glorious.” As used in her prior essays, she is describing the view she is seeing to make the reader feel as if they are standing there next to her, seeing everything she sees. Something that stands out to me is that she uses specific directions, south and west. Not only does she use ornamental description, she uses literal description, telling us where exactly things she is seeing are. What confuses me as a reader is does she really see this, or is it just a mirage? Her essays are causing me to really think about what I am reading, and I like that about her.
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