Book Review #10 – “Teaching A Stone To Talk” by Annie Dillard
Book Review # 10 – “Teaching A Stone To Talk” by Annie Dillard; 1982, Harper & Row Publ.
“We are here on the planet only once, and we might as well get a feel for the place… We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need… That is why I take walks: to keep an eye on things.” (Annie Dillard, from Teaching a Stone to Talk).
Genre of Book. This inspiring book by Annie Dillard is a collection of fourteen essays that display her unique powers of observation… of nature, human nature, and God’s nature. These unusual essays are genre-busters, because they could be considered creative nonfiction, scientific treatises, theological wonderings, philosophical musings, and keen insights into the natural world.
Brief Bio of Annie Dillard (1945- present). Born in Pittsburgh, Dillard had described herself as an angry adolescent with quite a few rough edges. But she said that she had “high hopes” for those rough edges, wanting to “use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world’s surface and exit through it.” She has been a major figure in American literature since 1975, when she was the youngest woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature at 29 years of age. Her award-winning book was Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a wide-ranging collection of essays she composed after spending a solitary year in what amounted to pure ascetism. Her meditations covered everything from the natural world to theology and spirituality to what it means to be human. One reviewer had said that her award-winning book was “a narrative testimony full of metaphysical speculations about what the natural world has to tell us about ourselves and the nature of existence.” The backstory to her prized book is interesting… After she completed her Master’s thesis on Thoreau’s Walden, Annie decided to move to an isolated cabin in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains for a year of full immersion into nature. During that time she wrote poetry and kept a daily journal of her observations of nature and her thoughts about God, philosophy and religion. Soon all her old notebooks and four-by-six-inch index cards were filled with over a thousand entries and ready to be transformed into a book. Dillard reported that “By the time I finished the book, I weighed about 98 pounds. I never went to bed. I would write all night until the sun was almost coming up.” After she was celebrated with the Pulitzer, Dillard taught literature/creative writing at various universities for 25 years during her writing career, publishing over a dozen books that covered every genre: nonfiction, novels, poetry, essays, nature reviews, and memoirs. Her college students noted that she was a chain-smoker who was disorganized and inspiring, prickly and brilliant. She is what one might call a mystifying mystic, who nonetheless has devoted herself to “staying near to Christianity and Hasidism.” She has said at an earlier time in her life that she was “spiritually promiscuous,” and considered herself a “none.” But in her writings she remained haunted by mankind’s spirituality and the presence of God in the natural world, and has claimed to be “stalking the divine” throughout her life. Annie Dillard walked her talk and provided a consistent example of her message to the world centered on the importance of simply paying attention to what’s around you and learning to “see.” Her profound insights into God, Scripture and the Christian faith reveal her to be a brilliant but ambivalent seeker, a complex spiritual thinker who had a difficult time publicly stating her faith convictions or her particular brand of belief. Annie Dillard published her last book in 2007 and unfortunately has suffered from deteriorating health these last few years as she resides in North Carolina.
Some of My Favorite Quotes from This Book:
An Expedition to the Pole. “Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.”
Living Like Weasels. “A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. The weasel lives in necessity, and we live in choice, hating necessity. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience – even of silence – by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t “attack” anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity. I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even…”
In the Jungle. “Piranha fish live in these lakes, and electric eels. I dangled my fingers in the water, figuring it would be worth it. The Napo River is not out of the way. It is in the way, catching sunlight the way a cup catches poured water; it is a bowl of sweet air, a basin of greenness, and of grace, and, it would seem, of peace.”
Teaching a Stone to Talk. “The island where I live is peopled with cranks like myself. In a cedar-shake shack on a cliff – but we all live like this – is a man in his thirties who lives alone with a stone he is trying to teach to talk. I assume that like any other meaningful effort, the ritual involves sacrifice, the suppression of self-consciousness, and a certain precise tilt of the will, so that the will becomes transparent and hollow, a channel for the work… Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block… The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail. You may ask God for his presence, or for wisdom, and receive each at his hands. Or you may ask God that he not go away mad, but just go away. Once an extended family of nomads said just that. They heard God’s speech and found it too loud. The wilderness generation was at Sinai; it witnessed there the thick darkness where God was: “and all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking.” It scared them witless. Then they asked Moses to beg God, please, never speak to them directly again. “Let not God speak with us, lest we die.” Moses took the message. And God, pitying their self-consciousness, agreed…. What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn’t us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: ‘Hello’?”
On A Hill Far Away. “The woman at the door was very nervous. She was dark, pretty, hard, with the same trembling lashes as her son. She did not ask me in, and she did not let me go; she was worried about something else. She worked her hands. I waited on the other side of the screen door until she came out with it: “Do you know the Lord as your personal Savior?” My heart went out to her. No wonder she had been so nervous. She must have to ask this of everyone, absolutely everyone, she meets. That is Christian witness. It makes sense, given its premises. I wanted to make her as happy as possible, reward her courage, and run. She was stunned that I knew the Lord, and clearly uncertain whether we were referring to the same third party. But she had done her bit, bumped over the hump, and now she could relax.”
Total Eclipse. “There are a few more things to tell from this level, the level of the restaurant. One is the old joke about breakfast. “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never,” Wallace Stevens wrote that, and in the long run he was right. The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God. The mind’s sidekick, the body, however, will settle for two eggs over easy.”
Lenses. “I was, then, not only watching the much-vaunted wonders in a drop of pond water; I was also, with mingled sadism and sympathy, setting up a limitless series of apocalypses. I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out. Over and over again, the last trump sounded, the final scroll unrolled, and the known world drained, dried, and vanished. When all the creatures lay motionless, boiled and fried in the positions they had when the last of their water dried completely, I washed the slide in the sink and started over with a fresh drop.”
Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos. “Sometimes I attributed to this island’s cliff face a surly, infantile consciousness, as though it were sulking in the silent moment after it had just shouted, to the sea and the sky, “I didn’t ask to be born.” Or sometimes it aged to a raging adolescent, a kid who’s just learned that the game is fixed, demanding, “What did you have me for, if you’re just going to push me around?” … Catholic Pierre de Chardin, a paleontologist, examined the evolution of species itself, and discovered in that flow a surge toward complexity and consciousness, a free ascent capped with man and propelled from within and attracted from without by God, the holy freedom and awareness that is creation’s beginning and end. And so forth. Like flatworms, like languages, ideas evolve. And they evolve not from hardened final forms, but from the softest plasmic germs in a cell’s heart, in the nub of a word’s root, in the supple flux of an open mind.”
God in the Doorway. “That day, a day of the following summer, my nice neighbor Miss White and I knelt in her yard while she showed me a magnifying glass. It was a large, strong hand lens. She lifted my hand and holding it very still, focused a dab of sunshine on my palm. The glowing crescent wobbled, spread, and finally contracted to a point. It burned; I was burned; I ripped my hand away and ran home crying. Miss White called after me, sorry, explaining, but I didn’t look back. Even now I wonder: if I met God, will he take and hold my bare hand in his, and focus his eye on my palm, and kindle that spot and let me burn? But no. It is I who misunderstood everything and let everybody down. Miss White, God, I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.”