Teaching A Stone How To Talk: Annie Dillard

I always have thought of clowns as sinister creatures. This story confirms this theory. While reading the very detailed description of the veggie made clown a feeling of eeriness hovered - alluding to a wacky or weird ending. Words like "dark" "derelict" "unknown" and "motionless" also gave way to the feeling of the story.

When the narrator mentions how she "watched the landscape innocently, like a fool, like a diver in the rapture of the deep who plays on the bottom while his air runs out." I felt as if the narrator was conveying a sort of back handed pessimistic view through an optimistic shell. What I mean by this is, children are innocent and naive, it takes very little for them to be fascinated, they hang on to the little things in life and are content - but children, while being naive to reality have a looming sense of trouble ahead, this trouble being growing up, hitting puberty, and realizing the world is full of mysteries and pain and in general isn't really cracked up to what it's seen to be in the young eyes of a child. Young eyes, this is what the narrator has when looking out the window on this journey, she travels because she doesn't want to be able to grasp reality, she wants to see the eclipse, to be taken away and feel closer to that unknown hemisphere, that unknown universe that possibly is a captor of pain, such as that of the earth.

A theme of death lingers through the essay with descriptive words like, "motionless" "deathly" "pale" "skulls" "winter-killed" "lusterless" "colorless"....While describing something the is supposed to be beautiful in all of its defects, she uses cold vocabulary and gracefully brings up the theme of the eclipse.