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decemberthirtyI wanted to love Teaching a Stone To Talk, Annie Dillard's collection of essays and occasional writing. I wanted to love it and be challenged by it, to wrestle with it, to be raised up by it and at the same time to be humbled by it as I had done when I read Pilgrim At Tinker Creek three years ago. The first piece in the book, an essay called "Total Eclipse," seemed to promise that I would get what I wanted. The essay is a description of Dillard's experience of watching a solar eclipse near Yakima, Washington in 1979, but of course it is also more than that: a meditation on death, on life, on human perception and what happens when that perception shifts radically and suddenly. The essay is breathtaking, brilliant. Dillard observes so carefully and then brings those observations to the page so precisely that the precision itself becomes thrilling to watch.
Alas, none of the other pieces manage to live up to this stunner. Mostly, I think the problem was that they were too short. That's a little strange for me to say, because ordinarily I love short writing--little slips of stories that gesture rather than speaking, pieces where much remains veiled because there is no room to explicate, bits and pieces with a poetic compression of meaning, where each word does the work of a sentence... But in Teaching a Stone to Talke, the shortness of many of the pieces just left me feeling unsatisfied. I wanted more from Dillard; I wanted the digging, the depth, the grand language that I know she's capable of.
The second best piece, after "Total Eclipse," is the last one, an essay called "Aces and Eights" about a weekend Dillard spent at a cottage somewhere with a nine-year-old girl (a niece, perhaps? The relationship is never made clear.) I'm not sure whether I liked this essay because I read it in a cabin in the woods with my own little two-year-old niece, or because it explores questions dear to my heart: questions of time and memory, the way moments distort in memory, the way the foreknowledge of memory distorts moments even as they're happening. It felt more substantial than many of the other pieces in the book, and was a good strong note on which to end.
I wouldn't tell you to run right out and buy this book, but if you ever come across a copy of "Total Eclipse," read it, my friends. Read it!
Alas, none of the other pieces manage to live up to this stunner. Mostly, I think the problem was that they were too short. That's a little strange for me to say, because ordinarily I love short writing--little slips of stories that gesture rather than speaking, pieces where much remains veiled because there is no room to explicate, bits and pieces with a poetic compression of meaning, where each word does the work of a sentence... But in Teaching a Stone to Talke, the shortness of many of the pieces just left me feeling unsatisfied. I wanted more from Dillard; I wanted the digging, the depth, the grand language that I know she's capable of.
The second best piece, after "Total Eclipse," is the last one, an essay called "Aces and Eights" about a weekend Dillard spent at a cottage somewhere with a nine-year-old girl (a niece, perhaps? The relationship is never made clear.) I'm not sure whether I liked this essay because I read it in a cabin in the woods with my own little two-year-old niece, or because it explores questions dear to my heart: questions of time and memory, the way moments distort in memory, the way the foreknowledge of memory distorts moments even as they're happening. It felt more substantial than many of the other pieces in the book, and was a good strong note on which to end.
I wouldn't tell you to run right out and buy this book, but if you ever come across a copy of "Total Eclipse," read it, my friends. Read it!
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Date: 2012-09-06 11:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-07 02:54 pm (UTC)Do you mind if I ask how you found this post? I'm always curious when people I don't know drop by my journal.
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