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.