50 pages 1 hour read

Annie Dillard

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1982

A 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 8

Chapter 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).

Related Titles

By Annie Dillard

Study Guide

logo

An American Childhood

Annie Dillard

An American Childhood

Annie Dillard

Plot Summary

logo

For the Time Being

Annie Dillard

For the Time Being

Annie Dillard

Study Guide

logo

Holy the Firm

Annie Dillard

Holy the Firm

Annie Dillard

Study Guide

logo

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard

Study Guide

logo

The Writing Life

Annie Dillard

The Writing Life

Annie Dillard

Study Guide

logo

Total Eclipse

Annie Dillard

Total Eclipse

Annie Dillard