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.
Themes
The Sublime
The overarching idea connecting all the essays is Dillard’s encounters with and attempts to understand nature. Nature can be beautiful, soothing, and transcendent, but it can also be dangerous and terrifying. The concept of the sublime was made popular in the 18th century by political thinker and philosopher Edmund Burke, who suggested that nature was innately sublime, able to generate strong sensations—including fear—in those who beheld it. Dillard subtly explores this idea in many of her essays, describing nature as something to be admired and revered but also feared. In Essay 1, for instance, Dillard describes her terror upon viewing the solar eclipse, feeling as though civilization has ended and she has entered the land of the dead: “The world which lay under darkness and stillness following the closing of the lid was not the world we know” (12). Others, viewing the solar eclipse near Dillard, exhibit a similar fear, screaming at the sight; Dillard also recounts that Louis of Bavaria in 840 reportedly died of fright upon seeing the eclipse.
In Essay 2, Dillard gives the history of many explorers who attempted polar expeditions and died due to harsh conditions. These explorers knew the danger but set out regardless, attracted by the “austerity” and seeking “something of the sublime” (35). Dillard writes of these events not as a warning to deter people from experiencing nature, but rather as an acknowledgement that the beauty of nature goes hand in hand with its unpredictability and unknowability. As humans, we can do our best to understand the mysteries of nature, Dillard suggests, but we must do so with caution and reverence.
Memory
In many of her essays, Dillard touches on the theme of memory and how unreliable it proves to be. In Essay 3, Dillard describes her extraordinary encounter with a weasel, in which she briefly goes into the mind of the animal. Something occurs to scare the weasel off, but Dillard writes, “This was only last week, and already I don’t remember what shattered the enchantment” (66). At other times in the essays, Dillard similarly laments the inability to remember things as well as she wishes she could. In Essay 1, for example, Dillard writes of her irritation that she can remember a particularly hideous piece of artwork in the hotel, when she has forgotten other details from her trip to see the solar eclipse.
In the final essay of the collection, “Aces and Eights,” Dillard focuses on memory as one of the central themes, describing her attempts to reconnect with her childhood self. Dillard visits her neighbor, Noah Very, who tells a story about choosing to remember a particular time: “I remember thinking, This is it, now, when the children are little. This will be a time called ‘when the children are little’” (182). Noah’s attempts to remember this moment work—the memory remains vivid in his mind—but other memories have since slipped out of his grasp. A loss of memory is a natural part of aging, but Dillard mourns the loss, suggesting that a memory represents not just a moment in time, but a piece of oneself that can never be reclaimed once it is lost.
God and Nature
Another recurring theme throughout the essays is the relationship between God and nature. Essay 6, “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” explores this idea closely. Dillard writes of mankind’s attempts to hear nature speak, comparing such attempts to mankind’s difficulty in communicating with God, as both speak in a language we do not understand: the language of silence. Dillard muses:
It could be that wherever there is motion there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water—and wherever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind, nature’s old song and dance, the show we drove from town (90).
Here Dillard correlates God with nature, suggesting that the two entities are intertwined. This suggestion carries from Essay 2, “An Expedition to the Pole,” in which Dillard compares her efforts to understand and approach divinity through religion to the treacherous (and sometimes shortsighted) expeditions to the Pole. She writes of her symbolic journey, “Far ahead is open water. I do not know what season it is, how long I have walked in the silence like a tunnel widening before me, into the horizon’s spread arms which widen like water” (59). Dillard acknowledges that, like many of the polar explorers, her attempts to reach God often fall short, and she holds on to nonsensical items that cannot possibly be of use to her but that prove difficult to let go. In attempting to understand both God and nature, Dillard often becomes frustrated by her humanity, which prevents her from seeing either clearly. Just as mankind has lost touch with God, Dillard suggests, so have we lost the ability to be one with nature, to listen to and comprehend the meaning of its silence.
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By Annie Dillard
