ALSO BY ANNIE DILLARD
Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974)
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
Holy the Firm (1977)
Living by Fiction (1982)
Encounters with Chinese Writers (1984)
An American Childhood (1987)
Writing Life (1989)
The Living (1992)
Mornings Like This (1995)
For the Time Being (1999)
The Maytrees (2007)
The Abundance (2016)
TEACHING
a STONE
to TALK
ANNIE DILLARD
Published by Canongate Books in 2016
Copyright © 1982 by Annie Dillard
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in the United States of America in 1982 by Harper & Row, Publishers, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York NY 10007
Portions of this work have appeared in Antaeus, Atlantic Monthly, Christian Science Monitor, Harper’s, The Living Wilderness, Potomac, and Self. ‘Expedition to the Pole’ was first published in The Yale Literary Magazine, Volume 150, Number 1, June 1982.
This digital edition first published in Great Britain in 2016 by Canongate Books, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78211 775 9
Designed by Suni Manchikanti
CONTENTS
Life on the Rocks: The Galápagos
For Gary
SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Ann Beattie, Marc Chenétier, Cody Rose Clevidence, Ophelia Dahl, Wendy Doniger, Tim Duggan, Paul Farmer, Amy Fields, Lewis Lapham, Will Lippincott, Allison Lorentzen, John Martini, Derek Parsons, Phyllis Rose, David Schorr, Timothy Seldes, Molly Simonds, Lee Smith, and Anne Warner.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Some of these have not been published before; others, such as ‘Living like Weasels’ and ‘The Deer at Providencia’, were published obscurely. 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.
TOTAL ECLIPSE
I
IT HAD BEEN LIKE DYING, that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been like the death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread. It was like slipping into fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering. We had crossed the mountains that day, and now we were in a strange place—a hotel in central Washington, in a town near Yakima. The eclipse we had traveled here to see would occur early the next morning.
I lay in bed. My husband, Gary, was reading beside me. I lay in bed and looked at the painting on the hotel room wall. It was a print of a detailed and lifelike painting of a smiling clown’s head, made out of vegetables. It was a painting of the sort which you do not intend to look at, and which, alas, you never forget. Some tasteless fate presses it upon you; it becomes part of the complex interior junk you carry with you wherever you go. Two years have passed since the total eclipse of which I write. During those years I have forgotten, I assume, a great many things I wanted to remember—but I have not forgotten that clown painting or its lunatic setting in the old hotel.
The clown was bald. Actually, he wore a clown’s tight rubber wig, painted white; this stretched over the top of his skull, which was a cabbage. His hair was bunches