Dillard's Silence

I find myself falling within the class consensus on Annie Dillard. In reading Teaching a Stone to Talk, I easily recognized her distinguishable skill in using nature to explore the theological and the philosophical (or perhaps using the theological and the philosophical to explore nature—a fine distinction between the two, neither of which I see her shying away from), and yet most of her pieces left me unmoved, uninspired, and indeed not in touch with the sublime she works so hard to capture. Yet it’s difficult to actually determine what it is about her writing that is off-putting and perhaps even slightly disturbing. Of course, I’m willing to acknowledge that the ability to inspire such strong feelings—and strong feelings of quizzical indifference, nonetheless—is sign of individual talent, but where then lies the origin of my uncertain, skeptical, apathetic response? While this is incredibly difficult to answer, I suppose it may perhaps be the way in which Dillard examines and simultaneously uses the substance of silence as both a subject and mode of writing. Dillard certainly uses language as a means to speak and comment upon her foci of nature and spirituality, and yet silence permeates her work in a way that hushes and mutes any signs of ostentation that is characteristic of other writers who typically draw a widely favorable response from readers (hence my initial disconnect?). In her essay “Field of Silence,” Dillard describes the “roadside pastures heaped with silence…the fields bent just so under the even pressure of silence…disguised as fields like those which bear the silence only because they are spread, and the silence spreads over them, great in size” (132). This description of the burden of silence is applicable to her writing, for while language speaks, the “pressure of silence” and that which is unspoken spreads through the pages and calls upon the reader to hear that which has been suppressed. The beauty of Dillard’s writing is quiet and itself evocative of the sublime, issuing forth an eeriness, loneliness, and distance that can be haunting and oppressive. And while I may not be entirely enthusiastic of her work, I can certainly appreciate the subtle emotion that is wrought in the pressing silence of her writing. Perhaps teaching a stone to talk, then, is Dillard’s way of expressing the idea that silence speaks louder and resonates more strongly than language itself.