Book Review: Total Eclipse, by Anne Dillard

In Anne Dillard's work, the mundane and the profound often walk hand in hand. This story makes an excellent case in point, as the scene flits from one to the other, and the two begin to intertwine. We need both, she seems to be saying. Without one, we cannot process the other.

This is deeply personal writing: Emotive, descriptive, and at the same time matter of fact. Dillard hooks us from the very first sentence: “It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass” (828), and we are sucked into the narrative.

She writes of the eclipse experience, profound and terrifying, that can only be parsed and understood later, from the remove of coffee and waffles. The mind needs to chew over what happened in order to make sense of it, just as the body needs to chew on food for sustenance. Naming things helps get a grip on them, as with the college student at the diner. “Did you see that little white ring? It looked like a Life Saver. It looked like a Life Saver up in the sky” (836).

I wonder if she is saying the same thing about the dichotomy between human and nature. Nature is grand and glorious, while the human is small and ordinary and everyday. Naming the things of nature—mountains, rivers—makes us feel like we have a handle on things. We obtain some measure of control by so doing. We may even be able to capture some of that awesome profundity for ourselves.

Perhaps, if we can tame external nature, we can tame our own. That said, this kind of control is only a human-created illusion. Dillard knows that all too well, and she reminds us how much we need that untamed gloriousness of nature in order to understand our (very human) selves.

Work Cited

Dillard, Anne. “Total Eclipse.” Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Print.

© Shaii Stone 2015