Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet’s crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we have forgotten we ever learned it. Yet it is a transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say.”

Dillard’s experience in seeing the solar eclipse and feeling as though she has died makes her realize just how much of life we spend going through the motions. Though humans like to differentiate themselves from animals, Dillard believes that much of our day-to-day activity is filled with the same sort of instinctive behavior that we don’t truly think about or control. Only experiences such as the pure dread she feels during the solar eclipse can wake us up and force us to see our lives as they truly are.

“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, however, will settle for two eggs over easy.” 

Dillard discusses the warring parts of the human brain—that which craves knowledge, stimulation, and exploration, and that which is satisfied more easily by distraction. Dillard has just experienced a monumental, life-changing event in seeing the solar eclipse, but she is taken aback by how quickly life returns to normal. In the end, Dillard acknowledges how human this reaction is and theorizes that this is one of the many brilliant, infuriating aspects of the complexity of the mind. 

“You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find the darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.” 

Dillard often resents the mundane experiences she has in church, but here she reminds herself that she undergoes these experiences for her own benefit, not God’s. God does not care if she sings the hymn in church or takes the communion wafer, Dillard argues; however, to reach God, these are the steps she must take.