Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

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Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

4.22 of 5 stars 4.22 · rating details · 2,041 ratings · 162 reviews

Here, in this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the world of natural facts and human meanings.

Paperback, 176 pages

Published November 11th 2008 by Harper Perennial (first published October 30th 1983)

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Apr 10, 2010 Shannonpresler rated it 5 of 5 stars

Every time I read Annie Dillard I become more responsible. In general. Her words are purposeful, she addresses sorrow, beauty and terror with nouns and adjectives that, if you aren't careful, look like every other noun and adjective you have ever read. But this isn't so. There is not a wasted syllable. Read about the Deer at Provenance, a story about a young fawn tied to a tree, resigning to the despair of its own death, and the people that circle around, quietly, and watch. And then read how sh...more

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Jan 17, 2013 Bobbettylou rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I would give this a 5 star except for the fact that "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" gets that rare (for me) designation. "Teaching a Stone to Talk" is similar but not quite there. At least 4.5 though.

This one is a series of essays, which makes it better, in my view. And if anything, more wide-ranging than "Pilgrim." While this one is more personal narrative than the other, it also has plenty of natural history, sublimity and pathos, philosophy and theology. In one short essay it can go from Catholic l...more

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Jan 24, 2010 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars

Not my favorite, though there are wonderful moments here. She seems in "An Expedition to the Pole" to get wrong what she gets so right in For the Time Being. In the latter, she lays her examinations--internal and external--side-by-side and leaves us to connect. They resonate against one another and flare out into unexpected meanings. Here, she smashes her examinations of the lives of arctic explorers together with her impressions of a largely mundane Catholic service in a surreal mish-mash that...more

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Dec 30, 2008 Stephen rated it 3 of 5 stars

It’s always good to visit with Annie.

“Teaching a Stone to Talk” is a collection of what Annie calls occasional pieces “such as a writer brings out to supplement his real work; instead this is my real work” from the early 1980s. It's bits and pieces, really. In the signature essay she visits a man who is trying to teach a stone—dark gray, beach cobble—to speak, not sentences but just simple words, an interesting scenario that leads to the lament that nature has gone silent. Can’t we make it spea...more

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Sep 17, 2010 Kony rated it 3 of 5 stars

If I love one thing about this book, it's Annie Dillard's bottomlessly curious spirit. If only her essays imparted this spirit with some vitality.

At times, Dillard's prose is exquisite, rapturous. And amidst her descriptions of nature, she interweaves philosophical musings that make you treasure your five senses and compel you to explore the world.

But here's the thing with Annie Dillard's writing here: nothing happens.

I enjoyed "Living Like Weasels," a compact essay that creates a psychological...more

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Sep 13, 2009 John rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is another wonderful collection of essays from Annie Dillard--carefully observed, primarily oriented around nature, and at times, surprisingly poignant. One of the things I like most about Dillard is her ability to see the mystery in all things. She realizes through her observations of the world that there's more going on than just what we see on the surface. The creature or created thing echo and reflect their Creator.

The earliest essays in this collection are the best, with Living like We...more

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Oct 23, 2011 Devon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: environment

Another delicious read! Some favorite quotes:

-The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. (16)

-Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter. Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week Christ washes the disc...more Another delicious read! Some favorite quotes:

-The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. (16)

-Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter. Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week Christ washes the disciples' dirty feet, handles their very toes, and repeats, It is all right - believe it or not - to be people. Who can believe it? (20)

-God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things...You do not have to do these things; not at all. God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot. You do not have to do these things - unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him. You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it. (31)

-Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. (69)

-The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing. (76)

-We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we have forgotten we ever learned it. Yet it is a transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. (97)

-...But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home. (103)

-I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. (150)

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Mar 29, 2012 Patty rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, readin12

Sometimes, when you ask someone how they are, you soon regret asking the question because the answer is more than you want to know. Some essays in this book were just too deep to be useful to me. However, I was moved by the first and last encounters with life that Dillard contemplates in this book.

The first essay is entitled "Total Eclipse". After the lead in to the experience in Washington state, "as the sky to the wst deepened to indigo, a color never seen", Dillard admits it was the last san...more

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Jan 17, 2009 Tricia rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is a book of essays: some reflective, mostly descriptive. Sometimes I was reading and thinking, "What the hell is she talking about?" But, it's worth it to keep reading because there are phrases and paragraphs that are just golden:

From "Total Eclipse": "The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel."

From "An Expedition to the Pole": "It all seems a pit at first, for I have overcome a fiercely anti-Catholic upbringing in order t...more

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Mar 16, 2009 Stephen Gallup rated it 3 of 5 stars

I remember the last time I read Annie Dillard. It was Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which was making a sensation at the time (1974). Her prose was strong, I thought, and her observations trenchant. But her tendency to go overboard in making a point felt like someone trying too hard. The only passage to stick in my mind from that long-ago reading concerned her amazement at the unthinkable speeds with which the Earth is simultaneously rotating on its axis, orbiting the Sun, and moving with the rest of...more I remember the last time I read Annie Dillard. It was Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which was making a sensation at the time (1974). Her prose was strong, I thought, and her observations trenchant. But her tendency to go overboard in making a point felt like someone trying too hard. The only passage to stick in my mind from that long-ago reading concerned her amazement at the unthinkable speeds with which the Earth is simultaneously rotating on its axis, orbiting the Sun, and moving with the rest of the galaxy through space. Dillard claimed to be lying flat on the ground and holding on for dear life, which just struck me as silly.

Thirty-plus years later, I’ve given her another shot with Teaching a Stone to Talk, and must acknowledge that this volume contains almost the same comment about planetary motion. But of course there’s a lot more as well, so much in fact that focusing on this one tic of hers seems unfair.

The opening piece, in which she describes a total eclipse, is so well drawn I feel as if I had been there. Whatever else may have been written on the subject, this surely stands as the benchmark.

The next piece juxtaposes exceedingly banal scenes at small churches, where mediocrity seems to reign, with the record of various mostly failed polar expeditions. It’s hard to imagine anyone else coming up with the connection she sees, but a compelling meditation results. In both cases, people are setting out ill-prepared for a journey toward something that is almost impossible to attain. Any hope of success depends on being able to give up things by which one defines oneself. Thus, members of a disastrous trek into Antarctica had no business thinking they could reach the Pole while dining from sterling silver tableware, and likewise congregants looking for a closer walk with God cannot afford to feel superior toward amateur musicians and bumbling clergy. The following passage is precisely what I mean about the conclusions she reaches:

I do not find Christians ... sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday ...

Well, my focus may well be unfair, and it may be driven by the same defect she’s talking about, but I find her hyperbole a distraction from what is otherwise keen insight and tireless mental exploration.

On the other hand, I envy her the kind of life she has apparently led in the process.
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Feb 13, 2013 Dayla rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I really wanted to love this book, given the great admiration I had for the author, Annie Dillard.

But looking back 11 years, I only remember somewhat interesting imagery. Actually and unfortunately, nothing "stuck." Commitment: reread before my life is over, using literary tools I have learned since my initial read.

What I do remember is Megan, the wonderful giver of this book. She told me that she admired this author a lot, and she thought I would also. For that alone, I really wanted to love...more

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Aug 07, 2012 Donna Girouard rated it 3 of 5 stars

Very few could dispute Dillard's talent and creativity. She writes beautifully. I sometimes get caught up in her many similes and metaphors though. She gets carried away. It's as if she has two (or more) great choices for each example and can't make up her mind. Or as if someone is standing behind her saying, "Put that one in too." Or as if . . . Get it? But the imagery is there and is vividly expressed.
Unfortunately, her subject matter is, well, boring to me at times, despite how well it is res...more

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Nov 20, 2011 Marcia rated it 3 of 5 stars

Metaphors between nature and life- wow. Liked the story-'Lenses'- the microscope & binoculars

p. 159 Story- Aces and Eights
…In all the history of the world it has never been so late.
p. 164 The child is riding her bicycle up the hill. I stand and look around; the thick summer foliage blocks the road from view. I turn back towards the river and hear playing cards slap in the spokes. They click and slap slowly, for the hill is steep. Now the pushing grows suddenly easier, evidently; the cards cl...more Metaphors between nature and life- wow. Liked the story-'Lenses'- the microscope & binoculars

p. 159 Story- Aces and Eights
…In all the history of the world it has never been so late.
p. 164 The child is riding her bicycle up the hill. I stand and look around; the thick summer foliage blocks the road from view. I turn back towards the river and hear playing cards slap in the spokes. They click and slap slowly, for the hill is steep. Now the pushing grows suddenly easier, evidently; the cards click and slap. At once, imperceptibly; she starts down. The pace increases. The cards are slapping and she is rolling; the pace speeds up, she is rolling, and the cards are slapping so fast the sounds blur. And so she whirs down the hill. I can see her through the woods downstream where the road evens out. She is fine, still coasting, and leaning way back.
We do love scaring ourselves silly- but less every year. Have I mentioned that my classmates are now thirty-five?
There is an old Pawnee notion that when you are in your thirties and forties you are “on top”. The idea is that at this age you can view grandly, in the fullness of your strength, both the uphill struggle of youth and the downhill slide of age. I suggest that this metaphor is inaccurate. If there is such a place as “on top”-if there is a sensation of riding a life’s span crest- it does not last ten or twenty years. On the contrary, the crest is so small that I, for one, missed it altogether.
You are young, you are on your way up, when you cannot imagine how you will save yourself from death by boredom until dinner, until bed, until the next day arrives to be outwaited, and then slow slap, the next. You read in despair all the titles of the books on the bookshelf; you play with your fingers; you revolve in your upholstered chair, slide out of the chair upside down onto your head, hope you will somehow damage your heart by waiting for dinner in that position, and think that life by it’s mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven’t the strength.
But momentum propels you over the crest. Imperceptibly, you start down. When do the days start to blur and then, breaking your heart, the seasons? The cards click faster in the spokes; you pitch forward. You roll headlong, out of control. The blur of cards makes one long sound like a bomb’s whine, the whine of many bombs, and you know your course is fatal.
Struggled with some of the stories but really enjoyed others. (less)

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May 01, 2011 Jenn rated it 4 of 5 stars

In this series of essays from Annie Dillard, though herself having moved through several views of God and incarnation, nature is given a newly examined status. It was, again, enlightening. Sometimes poetic, sometimes ridiculous. I love going back to reread what I had underlined years before and seeing with forgetful eyes what I had once found unbelievable and profound.

This book of essays will always be dear to me because of a very good friend in college. Every Thursday for a semester, we sat, dr...more

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Dec 19, 2010 Janice rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir, non-fiction-read

I love Annie Dillard's amazement at the natural world, and her wonderful descriptiveness. In this collection of essays, written from many different parts of the globe, she moves from musings about polar expeditions, to swimming among sea lions in the Galapagos Islands, to studying a river in Virginia, and then watching an eclipse in the Cascades of Washington. Some of my favorite lines are in a section titled "Sojourner", which tells of the mangrove trees as they build their own soil while drift...more

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Apr 20, 2013 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, owned

“If the earth were one unified island, a smooth ball, we would all be one species, a tremulous muck. The fact is that when you get down to the business of species formation, you eventually hit some form of reproductive isolation. Cells tend to fuse. Cells tend to engulf each other; primitive creatures tend to move in on each other and on us, to colonize, aggregate, blur. … As much of the world’s energy seems to be devoted to keeping us apart as it was directed to bringing us here in the first pl...more

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Mar 11, 2011 Derek rated it 5 of 5 stars

Annie Dillard’s "Teaching a Stone to Talk" starts with an author’s note that struck me the wrong way: “At any rate, this is not a collection of occasional pieces, such as a writer brings out to supplement his real work; instead this is my real work, such as it is.” It’s as if Dillard is saying, “I’m not like those other writers who publish for the sake of publishing. This collection isn’t some hodge-podge, slap-dash, last-minute schlock you can find elsewhere; it is a divinely-inspired, organica...more Annie Dillard’s "Teaching a Stone to Talk" starts with an author’s note that struck me the wrong way: “At any rate, this is not a collection of occasional pieces, such as a writer brings out to supplement his real work; instead this is my real work, such as it is.” It’s as if Dillard is saying, “I’m not like those other writers who publish for the sake of publishing. This collection isn’t some hodge-podge, slap-dash, last-minute schlock you can find elsewhere; it is a divinely-inspired, organically ordered arrangement of art.” Of course, if this is true the appropriate reader response is gratitude, not sarcasm, but still. Prove it.

Dillard starts the book in a hotel in central Washington, in a town near Yakima, not far from where I grew up, and quickly ventures out: to Ecuador, to the Galapagos Islands, to the Poles. Her essay about attending church and exploring the Arctic (“An Expedition to the Pole”) is hilarious. Her humor functions as a compromise with the reader: Put up with my non-linear structure and occasional poetic abstraction, and I will break out the jokes.

She’s open to receiving wisdom anywhere and finds all kinds of divine surprises: “an article I had read downstairs in the lobby, in an engineering magazine” (12); “a wire-service photograph clipped from a newspaper and taped to my mirror” (82); “a frame toolshed under whose weedy eaves a little boy was pretending to write with a stone” (96, 97). She seeks and honors what she finds “on the tributaries, in the riverside villages, sucking this particular white-fleshed guava in this particular pattern of shade” (73). She dwells in the senses and thereby discovers paths to escaping the chatter in her head. When she sees something amazing, her senses turn on and her brain turns off. It might be a shadow climbing a hill (“It… knocked us out… It had clobbered us”) or a weasel looking her in the eye (“It was a bright blow to the brain… our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders”); it might just be amazing (25, 26, 67).

In those moments of transcendence, Dillard mixes the usual and unusual, sacred and profane like no one else. A highway, a pair of ducks, a beer can, a muskrat hole, wild turtles, and motorcycle tracks, for example, all appear in one paragraph (66). And she continues from there to straddle the line between reality and imagination, and blur it. She experiences both the end and the birth of the earth and shares it as some hypothetical scenario: “The orchard trees withered, the ground froze, the glaciers slid down the valleys and overlapped the towns. If there had ever been people on earth, nobody knew it” (22); “It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled” (67); “The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back” (90); “The ice rolled up, the ice rolled back” (109).

One task I took on while reading the book was tracking Dillard’s use of metaphor and comparison. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek I had kept an eye out for semi-colons to explore how she uses punctuation to connect disparate ideas. This time I wanted to explore the connections themselves.

A comparison is made of two sides – the thing in reality and the thing it is “like” – and the connections and comparisons we make say something about who we are, our interests, our lifestyle, our body of available knowledge, how we go about filtering the world, etc. Writers like Dillard use comparisons not to narrow their topics but to expand them, not to pull closer but to push further out. What I notice in Dillard’s comparisons is that she connects her experiences and observations to ordinary things: eggs, washboards, dumplings, lens covers, trailers, pieces of thread. Without resorting to references to pop culture, she accesses a body of knowledge most people share. Not easy to do.(less)

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Dec 21, 2009 Janet rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: essay-general-nonfic, memoir-bio, writing

It's only appropriate that my favorite in these essays of expeditions and encounters by another of my beloved writers (raised in Pittsburgh as was I), "Total Eclipse," takes place in the Yakima valley of Washington, where Raymond Carver spent his early years. In this essay, Dillard magnificently details the adventure she and her husband had travelling from their home on the coast to watch the mystery of one celestial object move into the shadow of another. Afterward, over breakfast in a roadside...more

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Jan 24, 2013 Kim Buchanan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: spirituality

Sara Maitland referenced this book several times in her "Book of Silence." I thought it was time I read some Annie Dillard. The Boston Globe says this about AD: "Few have ever conveyed more gaphically the weight of silence, the force of the immaterial." Cover) I don't know that I'll use any of this for the WTBG Silent retreat, but her writing is striking....some of the most poetic prose I've read.

Especially good essays:

"Total Eclipse"
"Expedition to the Pole"
"Living Like Weasels"
"Aces and Eights"...more

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Mar 14, 2009 Maggie rated it 5 of 5 stars

This was the first Annie Dillard book I read. I fell in love immediately! Dillard has a way with words which will entrance, mesmerize, amuse, intrigue, and capture the reader. Her vast knowledge and relentless curiosity about this world and the universe empower the reader with a sense of awe and wonder. I dogeared so many pages and underlined so many passages that I might as well have just underlined and dogeared the entire thing! I shall revisit Teaching A Stone To Talk and Pilgrim At Tinker Cr...more

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May 15, 2012 Moses Operandi rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: alltimefaves

The last few essays in here, perhaps because I read them with real attention instead of distractedly and quickly, were some of the best of Dillard that I have read. Her images are always shockingly good, but in "Sojourners" and "Aces and Eights" she seems to have found opera glasses with which she can descry and describe aspects of human nature that no one else has catalogued in the wild. Dillard uses language winsomely, and sometimes I had to catch my breath and read a sentence again for the jo...more

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Jun 14, 2012 Jeremy Forstadt rated it 5 of 5 stars

Annie Dillard is one of the most satisfying essayists I know. Although I am not, generally, a reader of nature studies, Dillard's essays seem just perfect to me. If I had a single criticism, it would be that she generally ties in a theme or moral to her story to the extent that it would almost seems forced , but the language is so beautifully descriptive and the resolutions so elegant, that I am willing to forgive her for it.

In "Total Eclipse" she manages to describe the experience of witnessing...more

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Mar 31, 2012 Erunion rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 20th-century, essays, own, slice-of-life

If you were to ask me why I read and love Annie Dillard so much, I would't know how I reply. I suppose by reading this, you are asking me. I answer, I don't know.

To read her is a lot like meditating, for that is what she is doing. She is meditating about the trees on the Galapagos, or birds or fish or Tinker Creek or a thousand other things in nature. Occasionally you'll find a throw away line about her family, or her friends, or neighbors. Usually children.

No, she talks more about transcendent...more

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Oct 08, 2008 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

"Now we are no longer primitive. Now the whole world seems not holy.....We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism...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. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it. We are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind used to cry and hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless th...more

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Apr 30, 2008 Peter Sakievich rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Anyone

On my second round through this book, so I suppose it may be worth others' time. It's a compelling series of mostly disconnected articles about the author's experiences at various places and times of her life and what meaning she sees in them.

I think there are a couple quotes that overall define the general theme of the collection.

The first comes from the chapter Total Eclipse:

"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...more

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Dec 09, 2008 Julia rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: lovers of nature and writing

Shelves: non-fiction

I've read most of Dillard's work, but this thin volume of essays and PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK are the only ones that have stayed with me. The short essays in this book once again show the power Dillard has to weave language--as a former English teacher, I'm in awe just at her sentence structure! More important is how her awe about nature shines through--"Total Eclipse" gives me goosebumps, and the title essay is one of the best I've ever read.

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Aug 12, 2011 Wally rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

A good collection of 14 essays, or expeditions and encounters, as the subtitle says. Some are short and others are long. Some are observations of nature, others of society. The best one, to my mind, is the opener, which details her experience of a total solar eclipse that occurred in Eastern Washington in 1977. Dillard conveys the awesomeness and awe-fullness of the event beautifullly. She also has a great essay on mirages in Puget Sound.

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Aug 19, 2012 Hannah rated it 5 of 5 stars

Even when I cannot agree with Annie Dillard, I love her writing. She has a way of recognizing and capturing the layered beauty and significance of even the most prosaic moments and of braiding a unified, graceful narrative from seemingly unrelated and disparate events. And she does it with such a deceptively effortless style that it makes me almost believe "I could do this!" Ha. I know better. But reading her prose does always leave me wishing I could spend the rest of my life *trying* to write...more

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Jul 16, 2010 Kevin Schmidt rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

I fell for Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek", and I fell hard. Next, I devoured "The Living" and "The Maytrees", entranced by her accomplishments in fiction nearly as much as I had been with 'Pilgrim'. However, "Teaching a Stone to Talk", while true to her form, left me somewhat unsatisfied. I wanted more of the shorter pieces, especially those written during her visit to the Napo River in Amazonia, and found some of the other pieces less enticing. I should note that the first piece, involving...more

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Oct 21, 2008 Robertisenberg rated it 5 of 5 stars

Annie Dillard is, unquestionably, one of the greatest nonfiction writers ever to live, and this, so far as I can tell, is one of her greatest books. I actually enjoyed it more than "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," perhaps because the essays are a little more manageable, like relaxedly eating a bunch of your favorite cookies instead of an entire Black Forest Cake. The opening essay, about a total eclipse of the sun, remains my favorite, because it demonstrates Dillard's style through her most profound...more

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“You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.” — 57 people liked it

“The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.” — 34 people liked it

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