50 pages • 1 hour read
Annie DillardTeaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Essay 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Essay 8: “Lenses”
Essay 8 Summary
Dillard opens the essay by writing that looking through lenses is something “[y]ou get used to” and that it’s an “acquired skill” (107). Dillard describes learning to look through a microscope, learning how to focus, how to maneuver the machine, and how to see “through one eye, with both eyes open” (107). Dillard remembers a child’s microscope she owned as a girl and her joy in collecting pond water and watching algae, rotifers, amoebae, and daphniae. The five-watt bulb on her microscope broke, so Dillard used a 75-watt bulb, not knowing the damage it might do to her eyesight and the intense heat it put on her samples. Dillard recalls liking watching the pond water evaporate and the microscopic “members of a very dense population” die off (108).
Dillard then confesses this is all a prelude to discussing swans. At Daleville Pond, Dillard watches a pair of whistling swans through her binoculars. The swans have been “flushed” by Dillard and fly and circle the pond as she watches on. Dillard finds that through the lenses of the binoculars, she loses sense of space, not knowing which direction she faces, entranced “in that circle of light, in great speed and utter silence” (111). As Dillard continues to watch the swans through the binoculars, she sees them moving through the lenses like the pond algae she used to watch through a microscope as a girl: “They swam as fast as rotifers: two whistling swans, infinitesimal, beating their tiny wet wings, perfectly formed” (112).
Essay 8 Analysis
In describing her experiences of looking at life through lenses, Dillard uses a cyclical structure that evokes the shape of the lens itself. As Dillard describes looking through lenses, she first describes looking through binoculars: “You look at the inside of the barrel; you blink and watch your eyelashes; you play with the focus knob till one eye is purblind” (107). Dillard then begins to discuss the process of looking through a microscope, explaining, “You watch these swaying yellow, green, and brown strands of algae half mesmerized; you sink into the microscope’s field forgetful, oblivious, as if it were all a dream of your deepest brain” (107).
After detailing her experiences of looking at life through a microscopic lens, Dillard returns to looking at life through binoculars and has a similar experience to looking at algae and microscopic pond life through a microscope: “The reeds were strands of color passing light like cells in water. They were those yellow and green and brown strands of pond algae I had watched so long in a light-soaked field” (112).
Dillard moves from binoculars to microscopes to binoculars to microscopes and continues in this pattern, both to evoke the cyclical, lens-like structure and to suggest that these experiences are interwoven. In using both the binoculars and the microscope, Dillard can study life forms up close that she might have otherwise only seen from a distance. Similarly, in both cases, Dillard does something to disrupt the natural habitat of these life forms to enable her observation: With the pond algae, Dillard uses a strong bulb that overheats the sample, and with the swans, Dillard disturbs them during one of her walks and sends them flying. Though swans are much larger and more complex creatures than pond algae, Dillard suggests that the two are not so different—that all are fascinating to watch and are “perfectly formed” (112). Further, to observe both sets of life forms, we must train ourselves to look at them correctly, just as one must train oneself to correctly look into the respective lenses of binoculars or microscopes.
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