"Teaching a Stone to Talk"

[fiefoe]

The first essay is quite a stunner. Annie Dillard is so very good at reminding us the horrifying yet prosaic marvel that is life on earth.

'Total Eclipse'

• I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day... Gary.. was a platinum print, a dead artist's version of life. I saw on his skull the darkness of night mixed with the colors of day.
• We had all started down a chute of time. At first it was pleasant; now there was no stopping it.
• The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed.. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone.
• Seeing this black body was like seeing a mushroom cloud. The heart screeched. The meaning o fthe sight overwhelmed its fascination... Significant as it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance.
• The unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here.
• The lenses and telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breath and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breath and simultaneity of internal experience.
• The small ring of light was .. like a ridiculous lichen up in the sky, like a perfectly still explosion 4,200 light-years away: it was interesting, and lovely, and in witless motion.. It was as useless as a memory; it was as off kilter and hollow and wretched as a memory.
• We eatch our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up..
• We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add-until someone hauls their wealth  up to the survface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.


• The mind-the culture-has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shoevel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.
• From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.

'An Expedition to the Pole'

• There is no such thing as a solitary polar explorer, fine as the conception is.
• Both the priest and the minister were professionals, were old hands. They bungled with dignity and aplomb.
• They went, I say, partly in search of the sublime, and they found it the only way it can be found, here or there - around the edges, tucked into the corners of the days. For they were people... and despite the purity of their conceptions, they manhauled their humanity to the Poles.
• Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
• just as we are dissolved in our privacy
• Must I join this song? May I keep only my silver?.. One knife, one fork, one spoon, to carry beneath the glance of heaven and back?...They are passing the plate and I toss in my schooling; I toss in my rank in the Royal Navy, my erroneous and incomplete charts, my pious refusal to eat sled dogs... who can argue with conditions?
• Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
• The penguins are adorable.. because.. their impersonations of human dignity so evidently fail. What are the chances that God finds our failed impersonation of human dignity adorable?