Скачать или смотреть Isabelle Laurenzi on Annie Dillard: Road Show

On February 26, 1979, Annie Dillard (b. 1945) traveled east from her home on the Washington coast to the Yakima Valley to watch a total solar eclipse. Her experience encapsulated what she later called “the vertical motion of consciousness.” For Dillard, we live our daily lives in many mental states. Our consciousness “dreams down below… notices up above… and it notices itself, too.” How we transition between such layers of consciousness is the heart of her essay “Total Eclipse,” published first in Antaeus and then in her 1982 collection Teaching a Stone to Talk. The essay begins with Dillard’s descent into the valley and ends with her departure. It concludes:

“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.”

These final lines underscore the question driving Dillard’s essay: if “home” is the world—the geography and also the consciousness—from which we travel and to which we return, are we changed after the journey? What do we bring back with us, what have we learned, and how do we know it?