Annie Dillard: Essays Symbols, Allegory and Motifs

Sand Bucket and Shovel

The two items are mentioned on two different occasions spread far apart in the essay “Total Eclipse.” The first time without context while the second time with context informing their symbolic status:

“The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world’s work. With these we try to save our very lives.”

The Hidden Penny

In the essay titled “Seeing” found in Dillard’s most famous work, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard describes how as a child she used to take one of her own pennies—precious as they were in a time when there were many things that could be bought for less than a nickel—and hide them one at a time in plain sight on the same stretch of sidewalk for some stranger to find as “a free gift from the universe.” Her purpose in opening the essay with this anecdote is to introduce the concept of “seeing” as distinct from looking “looking.” As her career has stretched out from that story written in that essay, however, the penny has taken on a more personal symbolic value: it has become representative of the way that Dillard’s writing leads the attentive reader to a gift from the universe by discovering something precious to them within the narrative.

Fire

Fire is Dillard’s go-to symbol for the act of creation. In most cases, the act of artistic creation is the precise symbolic image being represented. Whether it is the death of a moth by candlelight which kindles the flame by which she readers or Lewis and Clark setting prairie land on fire as a signal to come down to the fire, the symbolism alludes to the extravagant gestures with which the universe continues to be created.

Talking to Stones

The title of both a single essay and the book in which it is collected, Dillard tells the strange story of a man who spent every day trying to get a rock to talk. This is image is both disconcertingly absurd and profoundly symbolic because in the end it is really a story less about the singularly eccentric act of a man and the lifetime achievement of a woman. For the metaphorical foundation of that man struggling to understand the stone by getting it to speak is that of a woman spending struggling to get the wilderness near Tinder Creek and the sun and moon during an eclipse and weasels and explorers who died on the tundra of Antarctica to speak to her so that she can about it. Talking to stones is the fundamental symbol of Annie Dillard’s body of work.

Lenses

One of Dillard’s essays is title “Lenses” and it is a recollection of her childhood fascination with how a microscope works to both to clarify and distort depending upon magnification. This concept will be one which recurs in several other essays. For instance, “Total Eclipse” she writes that camera lenses “enlarge the sight, omit its context and make of it a pretty and sensible picture” while underscoring the fact that this is a fictionalization of nature’s truth. Lenses become a symbol for a new and different way of seeing things and seeing is so important to Dillard that it, too, is the title and subject of an entire essay. But as a symbol, seeing through special lenses has both an upside and a downside and ultimately becomes symbolic of the necessity for learning how to really see things rather than merely looking at them.