Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Dillard describes a singing group that performs during the Catholic mass she attends. At first, Dillard resents the group since she joined Catholicism “solely to escape Protestant guitars” (23), but she acknowledges that many different people are on the journey to find “the sublime.” Dillard references the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility, an imaginary location the most distance from land in any direction in the Arctic Ocean. Dillard likens this concept to the “Absolute,” which is “that point of spirit farthest from every accessible point of spirit in all directions” (23). It takes a lot of trouble to try to find it, but it is also enormously valuable, which is why people try. Dillard has been attending mass at the same Catholic church for a year, an experience she compares to running away from home to join the circus. She describes some of the glitches that occur during the service, such as the trouble with the opening hymn and the communion wafers getting stuck together. However, Dillard believes that part of the miracle of church is that God overlooks people’s humanity in their attempt to reach the divine.

Interspersed with these accounts of the church, Dillard describes 19th-century polar expeditions in which crews often found themselves stuck in the ice.