“Disneyland”
This essay is included in the writer’s collection titled Encounters with Chinese Writers and it is just that: the account of a September morning spent in Disneyland with several Chinese writers, the hosts of the UCLA Chinese-American writer’s conference and, most notoriously, famed Beat poet Alan Ginsberg. What follows has been described as everything from surreal to downright hallucinatory as the collective group lunches at Club 33, discusses the oddness of Mickey Mouse and hops aboard for a ride though the galaxy known as Space Mountain.
“Footprints”
Featured in the collection For the Time Being, this short essay is actually just an excerpt form that book reprinted as a self-contained essay in compendium of Dillard’s works of non-fiction. It tells of Mary Leakey finding hominid footprints. What is extraordinary is how much of what happened on the day 3.75 million years ago can be detected from the paltry evidence available.
“An Expedition to the Pole”
This essay is structured around a series of subtitled sections that draw a parallel between famous polar expeditions and mass in a Catholic church as a means of analyzing how supremely personal vanity and self-interest always manages somehow to get in the way attaining a sublime goal. Achievement inevitably gives way to compromise and the sublime is always sacrificed to the absurdity of the mundane.
“Jokes”
his is also an excerpted passage turned into a standalone essay. It is derived from the tapestry of the author’s familial memoir An American Childhood. The topic is presented in the opening which asserts that for her parents, making sure their children understand the humor behind a joke was of monumentally more significance than celebrating Christmas. The bulk of the essay provides a window into the deconstruction of humor in what winds up being a very moving remembrance of the author’s father.
“A Writer in the World”
Annie Dillard offered up a collection of essays on the art and business of being a writer titled simply The Writing Life. This particular essay is representative of the author’s patented writing style that is so loose at times as to appeared unstructured. It opens with the advice, “Write as if you were dying.” Along the way is a short anecdote with the valuable lesson of the right answer to the question “Do you like sentences?” Other dispensations of advice include how writing a novel makes more sense than stories or essays (perhaps intended ironically considering the source) a graphic description of the day an alligator wrestler in Florida lost for the first time that seems absolutely irrelevant, but cannot possibly.
“Seeing”
Dillard’s most famous work by far is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the most anthologized essay from that collection is the one which comprises the book’s second chapter, “Seeing.” The essay commences with a story from the author’s childhood in which she relates how as a child she would hide one of her own precious pennies on the same stretch of sidewalk for some stranger to discover and enrich themselves. This sets the thematic concept that everyone sees the same commonplace things around us every day, but there are some people equipped with the power to see what is special in the commonplace. It is a task to which she sets herself in preparation for her solo, isolated sojourn in the woods.
“Total Eclipse”
Another highly acclaimed book by Dillard is Teaching a Stone to Talk which contains not only "An Expedition to the Pole" but this essay as well around which has risen a general consensus that it not only the book's high point, but one of the author’s finest works, period. In it, the author relates the story, in extensive detail, of a five-hour-long trip she and her husband take to place themselves directly int the path of a rare total solar eclipse. The thematic engine driving this essay which is much, more more than some mere travelogue, is how telescopic viewing of the phenomenon has managed to sacrifice the historical sense of dread and anxiety attached to witnessing an eclipse in favor of increasing understanding and technological awe.
