Annie Dillard on Absence

Annie Dillard on Absence
by Daniel Tucker

Review of Total Eclipse an essay featured on pages 9-28 in Teaching A Stone To Talk: Expeditions and Encounters by Annie Dillard (Harper and Row, 1982)

In her essay Total Eclipse, adored nature writer Annie Dillard describes in great detail her eclipse tracking and viewing trip from the coast to central Washington near Yakima. I guess it is less about the trip and more about the eclipse, but she makes the point that they traveled and she makes a bigger point to use the event of the eclipse to go in many wild directions. So it has a literal and metaphorical kind of travel going on.

The thing that struck me the most in Dillard’s description of the eclipse watching expedition was her description of everything she could not and did not see:

“Without pause or preamble, silent as orbits, a piece of the sun went away. We looked at it through welders’ goggles. A piece of the sun was missing; in its place we saw empty sky.”

She later continues to describe the optical transformation that occurred as the sun went away, comparing it to a historic film or a fantasy where nature looked metallic and screams emerged from the sky and everything was subsumed in a sublime vision that destroyed everything except the stars.

She takes liberty with the commonly encountered problem of how to write about something you cannot simply describe.