Teaching A Stone To Talk (New York: HarperCollins, 1982)
Why have I not read anything by Annie Dillard before? I wish I had encountered her writing earlier. It would have been a consolation when I needed it perhaps more than I do now.
She reminds me of the New England transcendentalists, Thoreau and Emerson, and more recently, Marilynne Robinson, who seems also to sit in that tradition. There’s a stillness at the centre of her writing, intimations of the spiritual that might leak through the words at any moment. She opens with a piece about travelling to see a total eclipse, waiting on a hilltop for the moment to arrive. Reading her book is like that, waiting on a hilltop with the expectation of a rare and possibly transforming experience.
One of her concerns is silence which she entertains most explicitly in the piece titled “A Field of Silence”. There, she writes:
I lived there once and I have seen, from behind the barn, the long roadside pastures heaped with silence. Behind the rooster, suddenly, I saw the silence heaped on the fields like trays. That day the green hayfields supported silence evenly sown; the fields bent just so under the even pressure of silence, bearing it, palming it aloft…
As a writer, she must often ask herself: where do my words come from? Maybe they appear ex nihilo just as the quantum theorist tells us matter leaps from emptiness. And the relatively insignificant act of pulling a word from the silence mirrors other creative acts, bearing a child, for example, or extrapolating further to the cosmic, God summoning the universe into being from the void. And all that was not, was.
She concerns herself, too, with the desacralization of the world, the way spirit has faded away, leaving behind the husk of our modernity. In a way, death, in its return to silence, is an act of desacralization. She makes much of stumbling upon a cow in a field and circling around to face it where she finds that it’s not really a cow anymore, but skin draped over a rib cage. The spirit is gone, whatever it is that makes a cow a cow, and what remains are material traces returning to the earth that bore them.
We see her fret again over the strange relation between spirit and matter in this passage:
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.
Elsewhere, she describes this as the task “of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.” I write this at the breakfast table with my morning coffee, and soon I will get up and go to the bathroom where I will brush my teeth and stare at myself in the mirror and see for myself exactly what she means.
Although writing in 1982, she could have been extending her concern for the sacred to the state of the world more than 40 years later where, more than ever, we treat our home as a resource to be stripped bare, an unholy thing that is burning to ash. She writes:
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum.
And just this morning, I listened to E. O. Wilson declare that humans are incapable of restoring the planet to its former equilibrium; only the planet has the capacity to do that; and it will take at least 10 million years. I have a certain faith that the Earth will do this; but I know with equal certainty that humans will not be there to witness this restoration.
Then there is the titular piece, “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” which recalls a neighbour in his thirties, a loner who is trying to teach a stone to talk by giving it regular lessons. It comes off as a humorous puff piece except, of course, it appears in the context of a series of almost lamentations for a world that has lost its intimations of the sacred. The context lends poignancy to the neighbour’s futile efforts to reinvest the inanimate world with a sense of transcendent spirit. Although Dillard gives no indication along these lines, I wonder if she isn’t inviting us to think of prayer in the same terms. I suspect that most people in today’s world regard prayer as an absurd activity no less futile than teaching a stone to talk. Dillard, however, is a fine advocate for futile gestures.
The final piece in this collection, “Aces and Eights”, dovetails nicely with the idea of anticipatory nostalgia which David Berry, writing nearly 40 years after Annie Dillard, lays out in his book, On Nostalgia. Berry presents it as a contemporary phenomenon which social media has given an extra push. However, Dillard demonstrates that, even without its official name and clinical description, anticipatory nostalgia was alive and well long before social media co-opted our remembering. In the piece, Dillard shares an account of her weekend with her nine year old daughter (to whom she refers throughout as “the child”) at a cabin in the Appalachians and culminating in the delivery of a cake to a crotchety old man she remembers from her own childhood. In the opening paragraph, we have this: “…the child and I would each see and remember some dim picture of our own selves as figures side by side on the riverbank, as figures in our own future memories, as focal points for some absurd, manufactured nostalgia.”
And so it goes, strangely self-conscious, writing in the act of becoming a piece of writing, reminiscence in the act of establishing itself as a memory. Together, mother and daughter sing old songs like “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise”, “Cherokee”, and “Basin Street Blues”. Mother cleans up an old bicycle and her daughter rides it with playing cards clothes-pegged to the spokes as if from an earlier time. All of this culminates with the observation: “We are, alas, imagining ourselves in the future remembering standing here now, the morning light on the green valley and on the clear river, the child playing with the woman’s fingers.” David Berry’s investigation poses the question: why do we do this? why do we mediate our experience through the lens of an imagined future self fondly recalling the feeling of enjoying that very experience? Drawing Annie Dillard into the conversation, we may have our answer: we do this for the same reason we pull words from the silence, or try to teach a stone to talk. We yearn for the sacred; we live in the hope that our experience is more than the positivist’s scrubbed bare fact; that there is a depth beneath our experience, a feeling, an intimation, a “place beyond” which eludes the tyranny of the ticking second hand and the flatness of the laid out map.
For The Time Being (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1999)
For The Time Being is wisdom literature, like the book of Lamentations or Ecclesiastes, but for the modern world. If Annie Dillard subscribed to a pedagogy, it would be the teach-by-example method, and the lesson she would teach would have something to do with syncretism. No one spiritual tradition can make exclusive and comprehensive claim to wisdom, so we are best advised to gather scraps from one source and another and stitch together our own patchwork quilts of spiritual convictions. Unwittingly (or maybe not), she offers her own wisdom as scraps for her readers to take up and stitch into their own quilts.
Like all wisdom literature, this book addresses ultimate concerns: the limits of human existence, and the question of evil in the world, or, as theologians would put it more formally, soteriology and theodicy. She opens with an entry from Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation: bird-headed dwarfs, siblings, deformed and mentally deficient children. Tacitly, Dillard presents us with our first question of theodicy: imperfection in God’s creation and the suffering it engenders, as it must for these children and for their caregivers. However, Dillard observes that, perhaps as consolation: “The bird-headed dwarfs and all the babies in Smith’s manual have souls, and they all can—and do—receive love and give love.” In the next few pages, she puzzles things out by turning to the Talmud, genetics, Kabbalah, Inuit lore, and the writings of Teilhard de Chardin. Syncretism at play.
Dillard has a thing for numbers, especially large numbers. She tries to tally up all the people who have died at the hands of totalitarian monsters. Famously, she tries to determine how many human souls have known existence since humans first appeared on this planet, arriving at a figure of 85 billion which, at the time of her writing, meant that the dead outnumbered the living by a ratio of 14 to 1. She was quick to point out that the ratio was uncertain and could be as high as 20 to 1. The only thing we can say for certain is that the dead outnumber the living. She turns her preoccupation with numbers to the question of the bubonic plague, which saw 13 million dead in Asia thanks to a little known outbreak in 1894 and which she adds to the well known 25 million who died in Europe in the 14th century. She directs her query to the 138,000 drowned in Bangladesh on April 30, 1991. Had she published this book five years later, she could have asked the same question of the 227,898 drowned in Indonesia and other nearby shores on December 26, 2004. More recently, and more obviously, she could have directed her concern to the millions dead from Sars-Cov-2 virus, adding their numbers to the plague victims and to the ever-growing gallery of the dead who look on as we, the living, enjoy our fleeting privilege.
Dillard’s preoccupation with large numbers accompanies a question she poses from time to time throughout her meditation: in the face of such staggering numbers, do individuals matter? What of their personal and private suffering? In an age of industrial killing, what are we to make of evil’s specificity? The pandemic has given her questions fresh force. During an outbreak of infectious disease, the WHO and local public health officials rely upon the discipline of epidemiology. But epidemiology engages statistical mathematics and deals with disease in the aggregate. It squarely confronts those large numbers that preoccupy Dillard, but in its abstraction, it risks losing sight of her accompanying question: what of individual suffering? The same can be said of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s not terribly secret desire to commit genocide by wiping the Ukraine identity from the face of the planet. Death in armed conflict falls more to the discipline of actuarial science but, like epidemiology, it engages statistical mathematics. Again, we are left to wonder about the granularity of evil as it is experienced by individual victims. Does theodicy place theologians in the same position as epidemiologists and actuaries by requiring sweeping generalizations from them? Or does it demand something more? Does it require them to place their fingers into the wounded side of individual victims?
On the matter of granularity, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she applies her numerological bent to sand. She tracks sand’s life cycle, if you want to call it that. Young sand is “born” when sharp flecks of quartz shear off old continental blocks and old sand “dies” when it settles into basins and pressure turns in into sandstone. Sand starts out sharp and angular and, over the span of its life, environmental forces like wind and rain soften its sharp edges. I don’t really understand how this works. I don’t think Dillard does, either; she relies on the work of a geologist who calculates that the world needs 2 x 106 square kilometres of desert to maintain an equilibrium between new sharp grains of sand and old rounded grains of sand. This ratio of sharp vs. round grains of sand echos the ratio of dead to living human souls. Like the dead, we assume that more grains of sand have fallen into basins and been ground down by the pressures of colliding continental plates than currently swirl around the world’s deserts. But as with people, does an individual grain of sand matter?
An aside: had Dillard waited a few years to publish her book, she might have added that while literary sorts used to express the idea of plenitude (or even infinitude) by summoning an image of all the world’s grains of sand, today we are discovering that sand is a limited resource just like oil or salmon or uranium. As the global demand for concrete and glass drives the global demand for sand, organized crime has inserted itself into the traffic of questionably sourced sand. One of the casualties of this new trade is an old literary trope, another example of how the riches of capitalism impoverish our thought and language.
Despite Annie Dillard’s clear-eyed account of evil in our world and the certainty of death, her meditation tends to hope and the prospect of redemption or, to frame things in terms offered by a theologian who escapes her mention but is part of my personal patchwork quilt, the arc of the universe bends toward justice. She serves as a counterweight to our natural tendency to interpret our experience as somehow extraordinary. Early on, she writes:
These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Though perhaps we are the last generation—now there’s a comfort. Take the bomb threat away and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn.
But, but, we splutter. Easy for her to say in 1999 when all she had to worry about was nuclear annihilation, a failing ozone layer, and the Y2K threat. Life was so easy then. Now, things really are extraordinary, what with a global pandemic, a war in the Baltic that threatens to draw us into a global conflagration, unprecedented global warming, fires that have consumed great swaths of our forested lands.
Annie Dillard invites us to pause and consider the possibility that this assertion that we stand witness to extraordinary times (an assertion, incidentally, which our ancestors made, and their ancestors before them) reflects an endemic hubris. Maybe we don’t matter as much as we think we do. And the way we read significance into our world is simply our arrogance writ large. She might look to our current claims about extraordinary times and point out that this perception is only possible when we examine human affairs from a macro perspective. It’s the perspective of the epidemiologist or the actuary. It’s the perspective that a contemplation of large numbers encourages. Then she might lower her voice and return our attention to her book’s central question: does a single life matter? In the last pages, she offers this:
As Martin Buber saw it—writing at his best near the turn of the last century—the world of ordinary days “affords” us that precise association with God that redeems both us and our speck of world. God entrusts and allots to everyone an area to redeem: this creased and feeble life “the world in which you live, just as it is and not otherwise.”
In a way, Dillard flips her initial question on its head? Maybe the proper question isn’t to ask if a single life matters, but to ask: how can it not? We effect redemption through simple, ordinary, quotidian acts. The arc of the moral universe bends to justice, not because we dream up grandiose schemes of moral revolution or planetary salvation, but because each one of us has the capacity to cultivate in our humble lives a sense of holiness. Applying her teach-by-example method, Annie Dillard offers For The Time Being as a model for how a single person can proceed on that lifelong path.
Visit Annie Dillard online.