Remembering the Forgettable
The essay “Total Eclipse” is a presentation of an event which, let’s face it, is so much easier to convey visually. Nevertheless, the stunning display of artistry with which Dillard describes the events leading up to the two-minute blocking out of the sun is a literary feast universally regarded as one of her greatest achievements. And yet, the essay begins with an entire paragraph in which her talent for creating imagery is put to the task of describing a painting on a hotel wall she herself dismisses as “junk.” Years later, she can remember as much or more about the painting as she can about the eclipse:
“The bright clown was bald…His hair was bunches of baby carrots. Inset in his white clown makeup, and in his cabbage skull, were his small and laughing human eyes. The clown’s glance was like the glance of Rembrandt in the late self-portraits: lively, knowing, deep and loving. The crinkled shadows around his eyes were string beans. His eyebrows were parsley. Each of his ears was a broad bean. His thin, joyful lips were red chili peppers; between his lips were wet rows of human teeth and a suggestion of a real tongue.”
The Explosive Power of Fiction
An American Childhood is a collection of autobiographical essays forming a memoir of how the writer known as Annie Dillard was formed by the way she was raised. That childhood was marked by extensive reading and a passion was developed and pursued. An unusual metaphor informs the imagery of that recollection of the power of fiction upon a developing young mind:
“A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.”
Surfing Sharks
“Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” is the author’s most famous work, a detailed account of time spent in isolation at a cabin in the woods. Despite this setting, one of the most vivid and unforgettable uses of imagery is put to use describing an extraordinary scene of nature in action in a way that even a camera could not duplicate:
“One late afternoon at low tide a hundred big sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a feeding frenzy. As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six- or eight-foot-long bodies of twisting sharks. The sharks disappeared as each wave rolled toward me; then a new wave swelled above the horizon, containing in it, like scorpions in amber, sharks that roiled and heaved. The sight held power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence.”
Tiny Creatures
Creatures appear throughout the body of Dillard’s collection of essays. Obviously, those written during her famous sojourn in the wilderness come to mind, but even in volume devoted to reconciling faith in God in a universe seemingly defined by needless suffering—a book in which a little girl disfigured by burns suffered during a plane crash—Dillard somehow manages to conjure from the magic that is imagery an entire universe inhabited by just her, a spider and the spider’s tiny prey:
“There is a spider, too, in the bathroom, with whom I keep a sort of company. Her little outfit always reminds me of a certain moth I help to kill. The spider herself is of uncertain lineage, bulbous at the abdomen and drab. Her six-inch mess of a web…is in a corner behind the toilet, connecting the tile wall to tile wall and floor, in a place where is, I would have thought, scant traffic. Yet under the web are sixteen or so corpses she has tossed to the floor…mostly little sow bugs, those little armadillo creatures who live to travel flat out in houses and die round…three old spider skins crinkled and clenched, and two moth bodies, wingless and huge and empty”
